I recently upgraded a win forms application from visual studio 2005 to 2008 part of the migration included upgrading the reports from crystal 2005 to 2008. When it came around to updating the setup project i went looking for the crystal 2008 merge modules to replace the current ones. The next few hours of my life were sucked into the seventh level of business objects hell. So here now dear reader I present you with the results of my trip to the underworld in a effort to help others avoid my fate.
The version of crystal reports that ships with visual studio 2008 is called “Crystal Reports Basic for Visual Studio 2008” this has assembly version numbers starting with 10.5.*. This version of crystal reports has no merge modules so the only way to deploy them without resorting to some kind of herculean manual effort is to use the supplied redistributable package.
To apply this package to you installation you need to bring up the application prerequisites and check the crystal reports checkbox. With the prerequisites you get three options download from vendor, download local, and download custom. If the client installation site has a decent internet connection leave it set to download from vendor, this will automatically download the redistributable from the business objects web site at around 17Mb. If the client site does not have an internet connection then go for the local option this will then automatically include the redistributables alongside you installer when it is built.
One thing to remember to get the prerequisites to be applied the setup.exe bootstrapper must be used.
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