Hi Rod
We have implemented Crystal Reports into AwareIM.
The reason is its versatility allowing us to quickly create reports and have it integrated directly into a tab in the application. The viewer also provides for the exporting to csv, pdf, word.
The best way to write the reports is using views over the Aware tables that way you can provide a toolkit of reporting options. Although you need to create these manually as Aware doesn't have an option to create or maintain views (yet). One other issue we found was the difference with MySQL on Windows and Linux. The standard install on windows is for lower case tables and column names where the default on Linux us uppercase. You need to keep these in sync if you are going to deploy on different platforms by setting lower_case_table_names=1
Similar to Tom's comments you can build AwareIM forms with dropdowns and data ranges to take parameters for the report and pass them directly to Crystal therefore providing an advanced and very smooth integration.
It is however a bit of a pain to setup and applying a build will mean you have to setup the classpath again, hopefully support will address and find a much easier way to apply new builds. But in saying this it does provide for very fast report creation using standard templates or Crystals reporting wizard.
We use Crystal 11R2 with Java Viewer 3.5 we have not been able to get CR2008 working yet as it appears the SAP have re written the viewer (V4.0) and you need to apply all of the service packs to get the viewer as they forgot to include some critical components when it first came out.
Fusion charts is great for building dashboards but you still need to create processes to export the data to xml unless I missed something.
