Installation and Upgrade Guides › Policy Server Installation Guide › Prerequisites for Running Reports Using Crystal Reports › Crystal Reports in a Policy Server Environment

Crystal Reports in a Policy Server Environment

In SiteMinder 6.0, the Policy Server does not install a Crystal Reports Server as with previous SiteMinder 5.x and 4.x versions. However, the Policy Server still generates audit logs and stores the necessary reporting information in a SQL Server or Oracle database. The Policy Server 6.0 installation program installs sample reports files (.rpt) that are compatible with Crystal Reports 9.0.

Note: These sample files are provided so that customers can continue to use Crystal Reports to read reporting data from the Policy Server's audit logging database. However, CA does not provide support for using the sample files.

The following figure shows a sample Crystal Reports 9.0 and Policy Server environment:

In the above figure, the Policy Server resides on either a UNIX or Windows platform, with a database for audit logs. Crystal Reports resides on a Windows platform, and is configured to communicate with the audit logs database.

The following steps describe the events that occur in a Crystal Reports and Policy Server environment when a user requests a report:

1. The Policy Server generates audit logs and stores the information in an ODBC (SQL Server or Oracle) database. The Policy Server writes reporting information to the database using the SiteMinder logs data source.
2. A user requests a report using Crystal Reports.
3. When the user selects a report to run, Crystal Reports creates a SQL select statement based on the user’s filter criteria and retrieves the information required by the report from the database. Report information is located in the smaccesslog4 and smobjlog4 tables of audit logs database. Crystal Reports reads the reporting information from the audit logs database using the ODBC Crystal Reports data source.
4. The result set of the SQL select statement is passed to Crystal Reports.
5. Crystal Reports passes the formatted report information to the user.