Hello!
We have an application that we embed both Crystal Reports and Business Objects in. Crystal reports is included with a base install out of the box and customers can purchase an additional license for our Business Objects reports. So, our application can run either Crystal by itself or both Crystal and BO simultaneously.
The application was originally written with CR 2011 and the Crystal Reports Viewer (13.x dlls) along with BO 4.0. When the application is installed, it installs the SAP Crystal Reports runtime engine for .NET framework.
We upgraded to CR2013 and BO 4.1 SP 5 about a year ago and have since run into issues when a customer has both BO and Crystal installed since Crystal is using the 13.x dlls and BO is using the 14.x dlls. We have been told they are incompatible with each other and that we should only be using the BO SDK (SAP BO BI Platform .NET SDK Redistributable 64 bit 4.1 SP5). However, our Crystal Reports don't display when using this (I'm assuming because the way they were built to utilize the crystal reports viewer).
We have created a band-aid fix to still use the Crystal Reports Viewer and the 13.x dlls, but trick it into thinking it is using the 14.x dlls so it doesn't give an error when running both simultaneously. We also ran into an issue where the pageNumber variable for drill down is different between the 13.x dlls and 14.x dlls so we again had to do a band-aid fix to look for either the variable pagenumber (for 13.x) or pageNumber (for 14.x).
We are trying to see if we need to re-write our crystal implementation to get this fixed the right way so both BO and Crystal can work together; and Crystal can work independently if BO is not purchased. We are planning to upgrade to CR2016 and BO 4.2 SP 2 in the next quarter, so we want to make sure we don't run into further issues. Any advice on this topic would be greatly appreciated!!!