Crystal Reports that output to Printboss

SOLVED

I took over a client who created a number of crystal reports that output to printboss. Very nice, but they do something strange with the crystal variable that evaluates to the trigger string

 

'PB#INFO '+Chr (247)+{@PrintBossForm}+Chr (247)+', '+

Chr (247)+Chr (247)+', '+

Chr (247)+{@PrintBossDocNo}

 

As you can see, they slap this special character which is called a cedilla around the data. Other printboss trigger strings I have seen use right and left square brackets instead of this. It prints out like

PB#INFO +FORM_NAME+,++,+123122

 

but one installation of Printboss strips away the special character crud and a different installation leaves it in causing  it to error out with "Can't find "+FORM_NAME+" 

 

'PB#INFO '+{@PrintBossForm}+ ', ,'+{@PrintBossDocNo}

This makes me think there is some setting in Printboss I need to turn onto get the crud to be stripped away. But I can't find it.

I could change the underlying crystal report to be

 

'PB#INFO '+{@PrintBossForm}+ ', ,'+{@PrintBossDocNo}

 

and that fixes it, but I don't want to change all the reports if at all possible.

 

---------------------------------------------

 

Thanks,

Peter Heinicke

  • +1
    verified answer

    Hi Peter

    I suspect you have different versions or regional settings on your 2 installations, but below is pretty specific about what is allowed

     the manual says

    PrintBoss recognizes the following characters as delimiters. Delimiters are normally used in pairs, though different
    pairs may be used in the same expression:
    Delimiter Description
    ' Single quote (apostrophe)
    '' Double quote (Shift + apostrophe)
    ~ Tilde (Shift + graves above left Tab key)
    [ ] Starting and ending square brackets
    ÷ Divide symbol entered in PrintBoss editors by pressing CTRL + Apostrophe
    « » Double arrows entered in PrintBoss editors by pressing CTRL + Comma for left arrows and CTRL
    + Period for right arrows
    The last two choices are the safest since they are extremely unlikely to occur in a text string. A commonly used
    short cut is to omit the trailing delimiter if the parameter being delimited is at the end of a line.

    All I got for you.

  • 0 in reply to Ron Boyd

    That's good to know. Where in the manual? Is it in help, or just the manual, because I thought I searched the online help. 

  • 0

    I revisited this problem again recently and this time Wellspring said that the crystal report processing had changed in Sage 300. It used to be a different version of Crystal in 2012 and it used to be bundled in with the software in a different way. So, the Wellspring tech said that even though the string in the report file was ok, when it got sent to PrintBoss through the recent version of Sage 300 2020 and Crystal, it was slightly different and no longer worked. the chr(247) delimiter is still good within PrintBoss itself.