Crystal Report Engine API

The Crystal Report Engine API (REAPI) is the most direct method of adding the Crystal Report Engine to your application project. The Crystal Report Engine itself is a Dynamic Link Library (DLL), and, therefore, exports its functionality in the form of DLL functions. These functions make up the Crystal Report Engine API.

The Crystal Report Engine DLL, CRPE32.DLL (32-bit), was installed in your \WINDOWS\SYSTEM directory when you installed Crystal Reports. This assures that the DLL is available to any application on your system that uses the Crystal Report Engine.

Note:    For complete information on distributing Crystal Report Engine and other runtime DLLs with your application, refer to the Crystal Reports Developer Runtime Help (Runtime.hlp).

The process for loading a DLL and calling DLL functions is a well documented aspect of the Windows API. If you are not familiar with working with DLLs, please refer to Windows API documentation before attempting to use the Crystal Report Engine API. You may also want to consider one of the other methods described in this section for adding the Crystal Report Engine to your application.

The rest of this section assumes an understanding of DLLs and how to use them in a Windows application. It also assumes a basic understanding of the C language. The examples here are written in C, and do not cover the LoadLibrary, GetProcAddress, or FreeLibrary calls.

Many Windows development environments support direct calls to DLL functions, Visual Basic, Visual dBASE, and Delphi, for example. Refer to the documentation for your development environment for complete instructions on using a DLL. Your documentation may also cover instructions on how to translate C function calls to the language you use. Study your documentation, then review the steps described here for using the Crystal Report Engine in an application via the Crystal REAPI.



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