Cyrstal Reports Commandline Exporter - How to Use

Crystal Reports Commandline Exporter

How to Use

Step 1 - Prerequisite

Please make sure you have Microsoft .NET Framework 4 and SAP Crystal Reports Runtime engine for .NET Framework 4 installed.

If not, please go to the download page to download them and get them installed

Step 2 - Download Crystal Reports Exporter

Download crexport.zip (9kb) or crexport.exe (32kb), then place it into a folder of your choice.

For the ease of explanation, we created a folder named "crexport" under C root directory. We also copy a Crystal Reports file "report1.rpt" and place it in the same folder.

There isn't any installation wizard at all.

crexport directory

Step 3 - Get into Command environment

Crystal Reports Exporter is a command line utility, it doesn't have a sexy graphical user interface. Simply run it under Command environment of Windows.

Go to "Start" -> "Run" --> Type Cmd and Press enter, get yourself into Command environment and type "cd\crexport"

In Windows Vista/7, Windows hide "Run" by default, you may want to unhide it. If you are not sure how to do it, check out How to Enable Run Command in Start Menu in Windows 7.

Step 4 - Export a Report

In this example, we are using a simple Crystal Reports that connected to Access Database through ODBC. Crystal Reports Exporter refreshes the data of a Crystal Reports before it prints or exports into desired file format.

Our command to export the Crystal Report is simply:

crexport -F c:\crexport\report1.rpt

or

crexport -F report1.rpt

You only need to specify Server Name -S when you need Crystal Reports to retrieve data from another data source that is different from the data source that is saved in your Crystal Reports file.

If Crystal Reports file is in the same folder of crexport.exe, you do not need to specify absolute path.

If the data source requires username and password logon, you will then need to specify the username and password in order to refresh data.

If you wish to connect to your data source with Integrated Security, simply do not specify Username and Password.

crexport -F report1.rpt -S server1 -U user1 -P password

file exported

If you do not specify any file types of output file location, Crystal Reports Exporter will just export it into the same directory as your Crystal Reports source file with the same filename and ends with yyyyMMddHHmmss in plain text format.

Please go the next topic to learn about other arguments of Crexport.exe