[Solved] Crystal Reports to Telerik Reporting Migration for 5000 Plus Reports

[Guru Praneeth]

We have more than 5000 Crystal Reports, with many reports containing an average of 7 subreports and extensive use of selection formulas, formula fields, running totals, parameters, multiple data sources, complex business logic, and multilingual support. Is there an automated approach to migrate Crystal Reports to Telerik Reporting? We would like to understand the available options for converting report layouts, formulas, subreports, data sources, and other report components, as well as the recommended approach and level of effort for a migration of this scale. Any guidance on migration tools, accelerators, best practices, professional services, or similar large scale migration experiences would be greatly appreciated.

[Krasimir]

I've used the Crystal to Telerik Report converter. It helps with the overall layout. However, you have quite complex reports and this would require lots of manual effort with your migration. I've migrated lots of Crystal reports to Telerik. You have to pay special attention to subreports and formulas as they are not 1-1 interchangeable between Crystal and Telerik.

There are some wild ideas that could be interesting for exploring and prototyping like - exporting Crystal reports in JSON/XML with the SDK. Then adjusting a model that could generate Telerik Reports with XML or JSON definition. I've tried a similar approach on a small scale. It still required some manual work but it's an interesting option to explore.

Progress Professional Services is also an option to be considered.

Regards,
Krasimir Baylov, Intway

[Terry]

This may help.

https://www.telerik.com/products/reporting/documentation/importing-reports/crystal-reports-converter

[Guru Praneeth]

Yes we aware of this Process but as our reports having the logos and other images embbed into the report with the supression logic.. 

and the supression logic is used not limited to Images its expands to the sections groups and other with minimum of 10 different supression apart from the subreports.. and configuing and managing all of this report manually will be huge amount of effects.. So we are checking of there is automation tool.. regarding the perfomace this reports are used to generate bulk PDf for a records of 500 each with average of 3+ pages per records considationg to 1500+ Pages. and will be running parallel of 4 thread for crystal but will as we need to process miniions of records per day. 

[Terry]

I started to mention AI first but I wasn't sure if you were aware of that tool. If it were me, I would see if I could train my AI client(s) for this and see what kind of results I can get. The client would need access to your existing reports, code, and expected results along with other parameters to keep it pointed in the right direction, but I've been impressed with what current AI can do. It is helping us with some very complex code work. I can have a one day conversation with AI and accomplish from 3 days to 2 weeks worth of manual work. As you probably already know, verify results from AI and if you give it access to sensitive data, make sure you lock it down so it can't share that data outside your company.

[Guru Praneeth]

AI is the second approch we went with.. But Crystal Report (.rpt) files are in Binary format AI is unable to interpect rpt file.. and coming to the degugging of the telrik yes we do use AI. But as Crystal to Telerik is conver its not helping us. 

[Dimitar]

Hello Guru,

Terry and Krasi have already shared the gist of it, but I would also like to share this KB article with you - Telerik Reporting Convert Crystal Report Programmatically - Telerik Reporting. It is especially helpful when you need to convert Crystal Reports in bulk.

However, as has been mentioned, the converter has limitations, and additional work on the converted reports may be needed. See Conversion Process for more details on this topic.

With that being said, improving the converter is something that we plan to focus on in future releases of Telerik Reporting.

Please stay tuned! 

Regards,
Dimitar
Progress Telerik