Hi all,

I'm new with Crystal Reports.

Can someone tell me if it is possible to have security by field in Crystal.

What I want is when a user wants to create a new Crystal report, to restrict the access to certain fields.

I know we can create dictionnaries, but is there a way to give acces only to that dictionnaries to the user?

Or is there another way of restricting acces to fields in Crystal?

Thanks.

If you're using the Baan driver, you can restrict access to a database field using Baan database security. The Crystal / Baan driver will honor that restriction. There are several different ways to restrict database access from Tools -> User Managerment -> Authorizations -> Database Authorizations -> Maintenance. You will need to know what tables are associated to the session that you are reporting against.

Gilbert Guymer
Database Administrator
Lufkin Industries, Inc.

We are using Baan IVc and with baan IVc, when you create field authorization, it does not include reporting. i.e. the authorization is only good for maintain and display session, but when you report on a table field, it will be printed anyway.

One of the few advantages Safari has over Crystal is that in Safari you're able to construct user-specific views (ie you can specify the database fields any given report-developer has access to).

Crystal does not appear to offer this option. It has rich functionality for pre-defining security settings on a User,Group or Folder level, but these permissions govern admin functions rather than rights to specific table fields. So far as I know, security options for database objects cannot be set in crystal.

If you install a password at the database level (say into your HR system) then crystal will prompt for this whenever you connect to it as a datasource, but I'm not aware of any finer security tuning at the data field level (ie no access to salary fields).

I have to disagree with you about Crystal not having that ability because it does. We use Seagate Info and it has what are called Info Views. The successor to Seagate Info is Crystal Enterprise and it has the same functionality. If you have the Crystal Enterprise Solution for Baan (the baan / crystal driver) it can be used with the Info View product as well. In fact any data source can be used by the Info View product.

I also have to disagree with you on security because Crystal's Baan driver observes security that can be set on packages, modules, tables, fields, data, and field data. I have used it and it works. They even have build in session security, but I have not tried that yet. You set Baan database restrictions in Tools -> User Management -> Authorizations -> Database Authorizations.

Crystal might follow baan's security, but baan security is not really efficient for columns (fileds) level security, it's only good for maitain and display sessions (where sessions have a main table).

When setting security on field level, if you create a report (in baan), users with restrictions on the field will still be able to see it. It is the same with Crystal.

As far as Info Views, they are not good for Crystal Enterprise (which we have here). I know in info views there was a column security, but I never was able to find it in Crystal Enterprise. I called there support, and they told me that they don't have column level security.

Now, if you know a way (from Crystal Report, or Crystal Enterprise) to do such a thing, please, let me know, cause we really need it here, thanks.

In Crystal Enterprise 8.5 and 9.0 there is a thing known as a processing extension. This extension allows for View Time Security (Column and row level security) to be invoked to 1 or many reports.