I'm currently going through all of our Crystal Reports and changing them to read from Stored Procedures instead of having the joins/tables inside of the report itself.
The problem is, I have to manually remove then add the fields. Is there a way to programmatically or mass change the report fields to avoid wasted man hours? Assuming each field on the report exists by a (slightly) different name in the stored procedure.
Unfortunately there isn't an easy way to do this. You can try going to the database, set datasource location and replacing each table with the stored procedure. Each time you do this you should be prompted to map each field that doesn't have a corresponding entry with the same field name.
Though I think crystal will try to alias the sproc multiple times instead of point all to the same sproc.
I meant to elaborate... When you come to designing more complex reports it's a kind of "best practice" to create formula fields for EVERY field you use in your report. This makes life a lot easier when coming to do something like this in future
