What is the Crystal Enterprise SDK?

The Crystal Enterprise SDK is a Software Development Kit that provides you with the tools for building scalable web applications. These applications can be divided into two categories: applications that allow users to perform client tasks, such as viewing, scheduling, and exporting reports, and applications that enable administrators to perform administrative tasks, such as managing servers, creating user and groups, gathering metrics, and handling security.

Client tasks

Included with Crystal Enterprise is ePortfolio, as well as a number of sample web clients that you can choose from to be your default desktop. These desktops are designed to be data-driven, allowing you to connect to databases, apply complex business logic to the data, and then control how the resulting information is displayed. They support report viewing through different viewers compatible with ActiveX, Java, and DHTML.

To suit your enterprise system needs, you can customize one of these sample desktops, or you can create your own web application. The Crystal Enterprise SDK provides you with the tools and components to design a client desktop with the following functionality:

• logging on to a database
• organizing folders
• previewing reports using thumbnails
• viewing reports
• searching for reports
• setting parameters for and applying filters to reports
• scheduling reports with events
• scheduling reports to a destination
• exporting reports to a common format

Administrative tasks

Crystal Enterprise also includes the Crystal Management Console and the Crystal Configuration Manager, which are components that you can use to access administrative functions. The Crystal Enterprise SDK allows you to create your own management tools—ones that can perform administrative tasks such as the following:

• adding and modifying user accounts
• managing groups membership
• applying report processing extensions
• assigning security rights
• setting server properties
• auditing licenses and viewing system metrics