Scheduling a report using a specific file format

This section explains how to schedule a report such that the instance is saved in a particular format. Before reading this section, you should read Lesson 3d: Scheduling reports in order to understand the basics of scheduling a report. Crystal Enterprise supports the following formats that you can use for instances:

• Crystal Reports
• Microsoft Excel
• Microsoft Word
• Adobe PDF
• Microsoft RTF
• Plain Text
• Paginated Text
• Tab Separated Text
• Character Separated Text

Before you read this section, it is recommended that you read both the Tutorial and the chapter on Architecture.

To schedule a report with a specific file format

1. Retrieve the report using InfoStore.Query.
2. Retrieve the SchedulingInfo interface.
3. Set the usual scheduling options.
4. Retrieve the PluginInterface for the report.
5. Use the ReportFormatOptions.Format property to set the format type.

   The format type can be one of the values from CeReportFormat.

6. If the format type is one of var ceFormatTextPaginated, ceFormatTextTabSeparated, ceFormatTextCharacterSeparated, or ceFormatExcel, then you must set the properties under TextFormatPaginated Object, TextFormatTabSeparated Object, TextFormatCharacterSeparated Object, and ExcelFormat Object respectively.
7. Schedule the report.

These steps are explained in the following sections:

• Retrieving the SchedulingInfo interface and setting scheduling options.
• Setting the instance format.

Go to the next step: Retrieving the SchedulingInfo interface and setting scheduling options.