Removal of Crystal Reports in 25R1

Can’t tell you why but it’s in the deprecation log for 25R1

IFS Cloud 24R2 Deprecation Log - Updated 31 Jan 2025 | IFS Community

Just read this as well

Starting with IFS version 25R2, Monotype fonts (Arial, Arial Narrow, Courier, Garamond, Times New Roman) will no longer be included in IFS Report Designer and IFS Report Studio. To maintain consistency, Déjà Vu fonts will be used as the standard 

What does this mean for you? 

If you currently use Monotype fonts in reports, you may need to either adjust your reports to align with the new standard or purchase Monotype fonts directly from the vendor and install them independently. 

Hello

I can confirm that Crystal Reports will still work in 25R1 for upgrading customers. R&D team will provide detailed response asap.

Thank you.

Hello All

The deprecated log is updated 
 

IFS Cloud 24R2 Deprecation Log - Updated 20 Feb 2025

2025-02-20: This is a revised and clarified deprecation notice compared to the one that was published December 2024.

The Crystal Reports integration is being deprecated and removed from IFS Cloud.

24R2

Deprecated, integration still available, fully functional and supported.
Recommendation is to start transitioning away from Crystal Reports.

25R1
Deprecated, no longer sold, but integration still available, fully functional and supported (24 months) for upgrading customers with existing Crystal Reports licenses.
Strong recommendation to start transitioning away from Crystal Reports.

25R2

Current Crystal Reports integration no longer available

Upgrade paths are multiple. Report Studio is the tool of choice for operational report layouts in IFS Cloud moving forward. A generic report rendering engine integration is being introduced to enable integration with 3rd party rendering engines for operational reports. This is a 3rd party agnostic integration, which means it can be used to integrate any 3rd party rendering engine that is able to consume XML as input data and produce a PDF as rendered output.

For ad-hoc reporting use of Crystal Reports (i.e. Crystal Quick Reports in IFS Cloud) several different options exist. These include, but are not limited to, Lobbies / Lobby elements and Power BI using BI Analysis Models.

Thank you for your response but still need further clarification.  Also, I would note new terms keep coming up that I am unfamiliar with.  I will try and be as specific as possible.

What is meant when the term “Crystal Reports Integration”?  My assumption is that references the ability to use a button to link to a Crystal Report and have it display within the IFS application will no longer exist.

If I take that same Crystal Report and host it on a Crystal Reports server it will still work but just won’t feel as integrated / seamless.  I would have to license the crystal report server independently.  Are these assumptions correct?

What is meant by Operational Report vs ad-hoc reporting and why is it discussed separately?

The 3rd party rendering engine that is meant to be Agnostic?  Will this allow our IFS Cloud to run our existing crystal reports but just have a different look and feel than the current Integration.  

My reading of this is that from 25R2, the Crystal component and Crystal Web Service provided by IFS will no longer function at all.  IFS will provide no method out of the box to function with Crystal reports. 

This will include Operational Reports (where we can currently create a Crystal layout based on the REP view for reports such as Invoices, Order Confirmations etc), and Ad hoc reports (reports published in IFS as quick reports which use any other views in Oracle).  These are being discussed separately as the methods for building them are different, but I believe neither will be available after 25R2.

You could probably have your own crystal server in practice, but IFS will not support anything to do with it.

I have no details about the new rendering engine, but my guess is that it will be for Operational reports only, as they already generate xml for use by report designer. If you have used the REP view for your current Operational Reports, it still feels like it will be a lot of rework to get your Crystal Reports to support an xml datasource.  That is just a guess by me though, take it with a pinch of salt.

I have another two notes at the moment.

1. In deprecation log is declared the with 25R2 will be integration “… fully functional and supported (24 months) for upgrading customers with existing Crystal Reports licenses”. It’s just theory because IMHO in reality cannot be such a long period achieved, On the contrary it’s necessary to implement new realease to customer much earlier becase a lot of bug corrections (that customers are awaitning to be delivered) are included just in Release Update and not in Service Update (generally with Priority 3 or lower).
2. IFS is hopefully preparing Report Studion enhacement that with enable to use alternative source - Query designer. It could be a suitable replacement for CR Quick Reports, couldn’t it? Unfortunatelly I don’t have the confirmation and information when it could be prepared fot use.

The removal of Crystal Reports integration is worrying.  We have a huge number of Operational and Quick reports with Crystal layouts.  

In my experience Report Designer seems extremely limited in comparison, but I appreciate that it may have been updated since I last used it. 

Does Report Designer support Sub Reports?

Can Report Designer display Custom Fields?

Can Report Designer use IALs?

Can Report Designer group data?

The answer I believe is no…. Report Designer is still the same old product that is clunky and unfriendly to use.

As we are currently in the process of updating to IFS Cloud it is a huge worry to us as a business that Crystal Reporting is being deprecated in this way.

We have in excess of 250 Crystal Reports running our business many with IAL’s that have been run a total of over 73k times in the past 12 months.
If we were to ask any of our users if their report is not business essential then I am sure that the answer from every user would be ‘yes’ the crystal report created is essential to every person using IFS in our business.
Lobbies are all well and good but don’t show the whole picture as a snapshot at that time and the data that you can view on screen is minimal.
Until a worthy alternative / replacement is in place and rolled out to clients then I believe that Crystal Reports should not be deprecated at this time.
I do not like the thought of having to rewrite or reproduce all or the majority of our Crystal Reports over the next two years either.
Surely we are not the only business in this state of flux ? 

We are operating under the assumption that if we need to we could stand up a stand alone Crystal Reports server and have an external reporting solution where user’s can still run our reports hitting the underlying data on IFS they just won’t be clicking anything inside IFS to get them to the reports.  

It feels like the unspoken part of this is IFS must currently absorb some sort of Crystal Licensing fee which they no longer whish to pay, thus they are removing it from the solution.  

IFS haven’t actually given us a reason why they are deprecating Crystal, whilst knowing full well that many customers use these reports.

With a stand alone Crystal Reports server how would an external reporting solution work, would it be a standalone program ?

In the europe escalation drop in call today IFS mentioned to contact all customers soon about the final deprecation notice with 25R2; Therefore 25R1 and its 24 SU are supported.

The statement is final. Monday, 24th February IFS Board confirmed!

This statement got updated here 5 days ago :) (see also comment above)
 

https://community.ifs.com/ifs-deprecation-logs-454/ifs-cloud-24r2-deprecation-log-updated-20-feb-2025-53774

We have found Report Designer to be unusable for complex reporting and Crystal has met the challenge very well.  

Report Designer does not have the features or flexibility that we need.

Has anybody come up with a solution yet to replace Crystal Reports ?
My general thoughts on using a stand alone Crystal Reports server are that IFS may at some stage block this in a later release.

What about SSRS Reports for both Quick and Operational Reports in IFS Cloud? Are there any plans to removing for feature IFS Cloud releases?

SSRS is deprecated as of 25R1, please see note here - https://community.ifs.com/ifs%2Ddeprecation%2Dlogs%2D454/ifs%2Dcloud%2D24r2%2Ddeprecation%2Dlog%2Dupdated%2D20%2Dfeb%2D2025%2D53774