Installing Crystal on PeopleTools 8.53

SAP bought Crystal Reports way back in 2011 and since, there is no love lost between SAP and Oracle, there is always an influx of changes in the licensing between Oracle and SAP. As of July 1, 2011, Oracle will no longer distribute or provide a license to Business Objects Enterprise or Crystal Reports for use with PeopleSoft applications. Existing customers may continue to use the license they have received. Oracle is trying to get PeopleSoft costumers to move over to the XML Publisher.

However, Crystal Reports had been popular amongst PeopleSoft customers for long and there are still hundreds of Crystal Reports, which a still in use by PeopleSoft customers.

In order to run Crystal Reports on the PeopleSoft process scheduler,  you must install SAP Crystal software, and then you have to install SAP Crystal runtime software. These files are available from SAP. Even if you’re on Windows 64 bit servers (Windows 2003 or Windows 2008), you need the 32bit runtime client. If you do not use the 32 bit client, you might get an error similar to this:

3704   6851       02/28/13 12:36:46   Crystal Runtime exception: System.IO.FileNotFoundException: Could not load file or assembly 'CrystalDecisions.CrystalReports.Engine, Version=13.0.2000.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=692fbea5521e1304' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified.
3704   6851       02/28/13 12:36:46   File name: 'CrystalDecisions.CrystalReports.Engine, Version=13.0.2000.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=692fbea5521e1304'
3704   6851       02/28/13 12:36:46      at CCRReportDocument.Init(CCRReportDocument* )
3704   6851       02/28/13 12:36:46      at CCRReportDocument.Init_safe(CCRReportDocument* )
3704   6851       02/28/13 12:36:46   WRN: Assembly binding logging is turned OFF.
3704   6851       02/28/13 12:36:46   To enable assembly bind failure logging, set the registry value [HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Fusion!EnableLog] (DWORD) to 1.
3704   6851       02/28/13 12:36:46   Note: There is some performance penalty associated with assembly bind failure logging.
3704   6851       02/28/13 12:36:46   To turn this feature off, remove the registry value [HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Fusion!EnableLog].

CRW*.log shows:

3704: 1362083806: PSPAL::Abort: Unrecoverable exception received
3704: 1362083806: PSPAL::Abort: Location: E:\pt853-903-R1-retail\peopletools\src\pspal\exception_winunhandled.cpp:592: PSPAL::UnhandledExceptionFilter::UnrecoverableExceptionFilter
3704: 1362083806: PSPAL::Abort: Abort diagnostics generation is currently disabled
3704: 1362083806: PSPAL::Abort: Terminating process now.
Crystal Runtime initialization failed

The issue is usually associated with the following steps:

1. Run any Crystal Report in PT8.53.x+
2. Observe that the process goes to Error
3. Enabling Crystal TRACE shows the error

Issue is caused by not having the Crystal Reports runtime engine for .NET Framework 4 (Crystal Reports version for Visual Studio 2010) installed. Also, Crystal reports are not certified with 64 bit platforms. You need to configure 32 bit ODBC driver on a 64 bit machine. This can be accomplished by launching \Windows\SysWOW64\odbcad32.exe

To Install the SAP Crystal Reports runtime engine for .NET Framework 4 (Crystal Reports version for Visual Studio 2010), you need to download Crystal Reports Runtime software from from SAP using this link: http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-7824