Integrate real time stock info using Crystal Reports

Crystal Reports was created almost two decades ago. In Software age terms, it’s a dinosaur. There are certainly sexier, slicker and faster tools to develop with, in the BI space today. But when it comes to integration, crystal reports is still the king. The reason why everyone heard of crystal, and any company still has a crystal reports being used somewhere, is its extensive SDK and robustness. The huge users base and long history of usage means that anything you are trying to do with Crystal was already done before, and you will find information on the reporting use case you are trying to accomplish with Crystal somewhere on the web. As an example, i posted this crystal report that leverages the RAS SDK to display stock info based on a user selected ticker. The report consumes a WSDL web service (from www.webservicex.net) as its data source, and parses out the response to display the stock info. The crystal viewer has been modified in this example using the SDK, as well as by modifying the viewer skin to accomplish smoother seamless integration into a white background web page.

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