Crystal Reports ships with .DEP (dependency) files for CRAXDRT9.DLL and CRVIEWER9.DLL, and it's these files that the Package & Deployment wizard uses to determine which files it needs to include with your setup.

However, the .DEP files provided by Crystal are crap. Crystal Reports are a pain in the ass to deploy because they need so many weird and wonderful files to run on other machines.

Crystal provide you with a help file called RUNTIME.HLP that tells you which files you need to include with your applications to access certain database formats, perform certain functions, export to certain file types etc etc etc. Run it and see it in it's glory!

Armed with this information you can then a) add each required file manually to the P&D wizard every time you create the package or b) edit the .DEP file(s) with the dependency files you will need for every project so they are automatically included by the P&D Wizard.

I opted for option B.

Since all of our apps use SQL Server as the database back end, and we allow the user to export their reports to practically every format, I created the .DEP file you see in the previous post based on the information in the RUNTIME.HLP file.

It took me all morning.

Hope this helps!?

As I said before, if you do this and include CRVIEWER9.DLL in your dependency file for CRAXDRT9.DLL make sure you rename or delete the CRVIEWER9.DEP file. Otherwise the P&D wizard will get upset and pop up an "Error 28 - Out of Stack Space" error. This also took me hours to work out what was going on.