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Trouble Publishing Crystal Report DLLs

I get the following warnings when I publish my application:

Unable to apply publish properties for item "crystaldecisions.reportsource".

Unable to apply publish properties for item "crystaldecisions.shared".

Unable to apply publish properties for item "crystaldecisions.web".

Unable to apply publish properties for item "crystaldecisions.windows.forms".

None of these DLLs are being published with my application. Consequently, an error is thrown when I try to open a Crystal Report in the application on a machine that doesn't already have these DLLs installed.

Does anyone have any idea why a DLL would fail to publish?

E Jensen

I figured out how to get rid of the warnings, though that doesn't mean the DLL files will actually get published. If you set your references to Copy Local, then their publish status will/can be set to Include (auto). For some reason, when the publish status is set to Include (auto) instead of Include, the warnings go away.

In order to actually install the DLLs to the user machines, the only way I can figure is to publish with the additional prerequisites setup program created to include Crystal Reports for .NET Framework 2.0.

It seems to me like Microsoft is purposely not allowing us to publish the Crystal Report DLL files directly because they want to avoid having a new set of these DLL files installed on the user machine for each .NET 2.0 application that uses Crystal Reports. Since use of Crystal Reports is pretty widespread, I guess it is preferred to install once to the GAC per machine, even though the extra step in the installation process is a bit cumbersome. Either that, or maybe there is a licensing issue that forces Microsoft to go this route so that the user can agree to the licensing agreement for Crystal Reports.

Does a representative of Microsoft care to shed light on my speculation? I would prefer to publish the Crystal Report DLL files directly instead of installing to the GAC, but maybe that is not possible for a good reason.

E Jensen

Actually, it's Business Objects that doesn't want their dlls published with your project: it is not feasible to service assemblies installed SxS with an application, and tool is doing all it possibly can to prevent you from doing so. You should use the bootstrapper to distribute Crystal Reports; even if the extra step is cumbersome, you should only have to do it once per machine.

-- Mike

MWade_MS

I figured it had to be intentional. Thanks for the information. It's nice to know that I am now using the bootstrapper because that's the proper way to do it rather than because I had to resort to a workaround after not getting my preferred method to work.

E Jensen

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