I recently ran into an issue sequencing an application that uses the Crystal Reports runtime 13. The application worked properly when natively installed on a machine, but thew errors when it was virtualized with App-V 5. It complained about a particular GUID and not being able to locate some DLLs.
I found a similar issue on the TechNet forums where an application that used Crystal runtime 13 worked properly in App-V 5.0 RTM, but not with SP2+. It appears Microsoft fixed some issues with buffering in the updated Service Pack. Which in turn ‘broke’ crystal integration with the application. I checked out the installation path for the Crystal runtime and it sure has some long paths!
C:\Program Files (x86)\SAP BusinessObjects\Crystal Reports for .NET Framework 4.0\Common\Crystal Reports 2011\crystalreportviewers
C:\Program Files (x86)\SAP BusinessObjects\Crystal Reports for .NET Framework 4.0\Common\SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise XI 4.0\win32_x86
The OP of that issue was able to resolve it by creating an MST to shorten the file and registry paths. I was curious if I could fix this issue without creating an MST. I couldn’t find any install parameters for the runtime, but found ones for full-blown Crystal. The one I wanted was this:
After confirming the same parameter worked with the runtime installer, I set installdir to – C:\Program Files (x86)\1\
This changed the installation directory to: C:\Program Files (x86)\1\Crystal Reports for .NET Framework 4.0\Common\..
It only saved 18 characters, but it might just do the trick…. And it did! Now the application is able to run reports without error.
The underlying issue here is that installation path is too long when you sequence it. Maybe the next verison of the Crystal runtime will have shorter paths…. If not, we should at least have a work around.
Here’s a bonus! – I hard a hard time locating a download page for the runtime, but I found it here.