Extract data from Crystal Reports via Web Service

Question

I would like to access the aggregated data of a chart in a Crystal Report. It seems there are many different Web services such as SAP BO RESTful Web Service, Crystal Reports REST WebService, OpenDocument Web service and it is - to be honest - a bit confusing.

Does anyone know if accessing the aggregated data of a Crystal Report via a Web Service is possible? If so, which web service is the correct one? In the best case I would expect to get the data in XML or JSON format in return.

Thanks for your suggestions. :)

Answer 1

I'm not an expert on Crystal Reports, but you can already eliminate OpenDocument for this scenario, as this is used to open a document hosted in the BI Platform, and display it in the browser. The use case for OpenDocument is to provide inter- and intra-document links as well as allow you to link from outside the BI Platform to a specific document.

Using the Crystal Report REST SDK, you could perhaps use the OData protocol to retrieve the necessary information. Have a look at the RESTful Web Services documentation to see if that provides what you need (OData is described in section 3.6).