Unbound Currency Fields and Regional Settings

Some of the unbound fields in Crystal Reports are affected by the operating system's default settings. For example on a machine with a US locale the date will be of the format mm/dd/yyyy. For dates, this can be easily overridden by setting the DateWindowsDefaultType property to crNotUsingWindowsDefaults. Unfortunately such an option does not exist for currency fields. Setting the property CurrencySymbol is completely ignored and there is nothing you can do about it. The easiest workaround is to use a number field rather than a currency one and then use the CurrencySymbol property.

Deployment

First of all, ensure that your development machines have the latest service pack and critical updates. Once you have done that, download the latest merge modules.

Just to be safe, when you create a new setup project exclude Crystal_Managed2003.sms, which is automatically added by Visual Studio under Detected Dependencies. Then, manually add all the merge modules (yes all, even if you don't think you need them, you probably do; more information on this later on) that you downloaded as well as the following two merge modules that are not included in the download, but are already on your machine.

VC_User_CRT71_RTL_X86_---.msm
VC_User_STL71_RTL X86 ---.msm

If you have performed all these steps correctly you should have the following 6 merge modules added to the setup project.

Crystal_Database_Access2003.msm (latest version included in the download)
Crystal_Database_Access2003_enu.msm (latest version included in the download)
Crystal_Managed2003.msm (latest version included in the download)
Crystal_regwiz2003.msm (latest version included in the download)
VC_User_CRT71_RTL_X86_---.msm (already on your machine)
VC_User_STL71_RTL X86 ---.msm (already on your machine)

Now select Crystal_regwiz2003.msm in Solution Explorer and view its properties. Find the (MergeModulePropeties) property and expand it. A property called License Key should have appeared. In this property enter the key that you will find in the About dialog under the Help menu in Visual Studio. The key will be 19 characters long and probably look something like AAP50-GS99999-U9999RN. That's it, you can now add the project outputs and contents of your projects to the installer and build it.

You might think that some of the merge modules mentioned earlier do not really apply to your reports. The names of the merge modules are deceiving. Crystal_Managed2003.msm is always required no matter how your reports are built and so is Crystal_regwiz2003.msm because that is the only way to register Crystal Reports on the deployment machine. Crystal_DatabaseAccess2003.msm and Crystal_Database_Access2003_enu.sms apart from drivers for database connectivity they also contain the dlls that allow reports to be exported to other formats such as PDFs and Word documents. If your reports access any ADO.NET datasets then VC_User_CRT71_RTL_X86_---.msm and VC_User_STL71_RTL X86 ---.msm are also required. For (a bit) more information you can read this document.