I have often wondered about what the alerts functionality in Crystal Reports was all about so I though I would take a little time to figure it out today. The scenario I will use gives me an alert that identifies when and if a certain Account record qualifies for a report I have written.
To get help with this functionality you can use Crystal Help, use the search word “Alert”. This will provide you all of the detail you need to be successful.
To start I will create the alert by selecting the Report>Alerts menu item, the Create Alerts dialog comes into view. Here you can select to either add a new or edit an existing alert. We will select the “Add” button and a new alert dialog will open. I labeled my alert “Test”. You can insert a simple message in the Message field or you can use the formula editor to create a rule based alert. I entered the following into the message field and added:
“The Account Customer FX is contained within this report.”
Next we need a formula to call the alert, this is done using the “Condition” button. This opens the Alert Condition Formula Editor in which I added the following formula.
If {ACCOUNT.ACCOUNT} = “Customer FX Corporation” .
When the Formula Editor closes, ensure the alert is enabled and select the OK button. You are returned to the Create Alerts dialog close and your all set!
When I refreshed the report by selecting the F5 key. I received the following dialog.
Click in the View Records button and the report will filter down to just the record that qualified for the alert.
Thats it. I think this would be very useful in many instance to call records out. Maybe with History records of certain type or Opportunities that meet a certain probability or complete a step in a sales process.
Pretty cool way of identifying critical information with very little change to an existing report.
Thanks for reading
George
your guidance helped me a lot. will definitely follow your blog.