Although calling out outlying values can be accomplished by using conditional formatting, the alerting feature inside Crystal Reports allows for more interactive identification of key data as well as pushing of those alerts to end users via Crystal Enterprise's alerting functionality.
A report alert is a custom notification created within Crystal Reports, triggered when a predetermined condition is met. An alert is comprised of three integral parts:
Alerts serve the dual functions of bringing end-user attention to a certain condition being met and focusing end-user attention on specifically relevant data in a report—thereby increasing user efficiency. Some examples of reports in which alerts could provide a benefit are outlined in Table 11.1.
Report alerts are triggered when the report is processed and the associated condition has been met. When this condition is true, the alert message will be displayed. Figure 11.3 displays a triggered alert from within the Crystal Reports Designer.
To create or edit alerts in Crystal Reports, select the Report, Alerts, Create or Modify Alerts menu items. This dialog (shown in Figure 11.4) enables you to create a new alert, edit existing alerts, and remove existing alerts.
To create the alert, follow these steps:
To see your alert in action, refresh the report with data that meets your alert condition, and triggered alerts will be displayed.
Finally, not only are you notified that the alerts have been triggered, you can click the View Records button on the Report Alerts pop-up dialog to filter the report to show only those records that triggered the alert. This is a good way to draw attention to the key outliers in the data.
The Report Alerts dialog displayed in Figure 11.3 is only available from within the Crystal Reports Designer. If you are delivering your reports via another mechanism such as the Web, alerts are handled differently. To have your end users take advantage of Crystal Reports alerting, you will need to either use Crystal Enterprise for report distribution or exploit the built-in alert functions (IsAlertEnabled(), IsAlertTriggered(), and AlertMessage()) within formulas you create in your report.
For more information on Crystal Enterprise, see Chapter 24, “Crystal Enterprise Architecture.”
Typically, alerts can be shown to end users in a portal, which then links back to the report.
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End users viewing a report from an alert in Crystal Enterprise do not see the items matching the alert conditions—they see the entire report. This leads to some discontinuity both from the Crystal Reports experience and also from the end users' expectation that they should now see values called out in the alert.
To make this more logical for the end user, create a version of the same report (perhaps use a naming convention like ALERT_reportname.rpt) with the alert and also a filtering condition matching the alert condition. Thus, when end users click on an alert in Crystal Enterprise, they will see a version of the report containing only the relevant values.
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