Deploying a Crystal Reports Application to a Remote Server

A common misconception about deploying a Crystal Reports application written in ASP.NET is that the remote server must have the Crystal Reports .NET server components installed. The only thing to keep in mind is that you must purchase a licensed copy of Crystal Reports from Business Objects (www.businessobjects.com) in order to deploy your application to a remote server. The license for the version that comes shipped with Visual Studio .NET is just for evaluation and only works on the local development machine.
The issue that developers run into is how the Crystal Reports Developer tool is installed on the development machine. When installed, the developer tool installs the server components into the following directory:
C:\Program Files\Common Files\Crystal Decisions\2.5\managed
From there, the components are registered into the local machine's Global Assembly Cache (GAC) located in C:\windows\assembly. If you are using Visual Studio .NET to develop your application, then you reference the Crystal Decisions classes from the GAC. This is fine when you run the application on the local machine. But when you deploy the application to the remote server, by default you will get an error because the Crystal Decisions components are not registered in the remote server's GAC. Here is how you work around this issue.
For all of the classes your application references, you need to go to the above Common Files directory and copy the matching DLL files to your application bin folder. The bin folder is located in the root of your Visual Studio .NET application. Once you have copied the DLLs, remove any old references from your Visual Studio .NET application. You will find this setting in Solution Explorer under References. Right-click any CrystalDecisions.* reference and select Remove. Then right-click on Reference and select Add Reference. Click Browse, where the default directory should be your application's root, and double-click the bin directory. Select the Crystal Decisions components and click Open and then OK. Recompile your application, and upload it to the remote application. Make sure you upload all of the contents of the bin folder.
With the steps above, you should not have any issues deploying your Crystal Reports application built with Visual Studio .NET. If you are still using classic ASP to generate your Crystal Reports, then the components still have to be registered on the server: either use the Installation CD or extract the components and manually register the components on the web server using regsvr32.exe or a COM+ package. You can find additional support information atwww.businessobjects.com/support/default.asp.