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asp.netcrystal-reportsmaster-pages

Crystal report is making the menu for master page disappear

For some reason whenever I go to the page of my website that has the crystal report on it my main navigation bar disappears. Here is what the header for the site (with the navigation menu) is suppose to look like:

what the site is suppose to look like

and here is what it looks like when there is a report on the page:

what it looks like with a report

Could someone tell me what is causing this and how I can fix it? I'm using master page for the header by the way.

Solution

  • Greener, the Crystal Report viewer is a dynamic HTML representation of the report. It combines JavaScript, HTML and CSS (duh, what doesn't) to represent your report on the webpage. The toolbars are powered by JavaScript calls to .JS that is linked in when the CrystalReportViewer control is rendered to your page.

    My point is, all of this introduces a LOT of stuff that can conflict with your existing page. In particular JavaScript errors can occur (which can cause certain things to stop rendering) OR CSS the report uses happens to apply styles you never intended to have applied to objects in your page.

    I highly recommend installing the Web Developer toolbar and/or FireBug to FireFox, IE, or whatever browser they are offered on these days. FireFox's implementation of those is quite good in my experience.

    When the page loads you can use the 'CSS' menu of the Web Developer toolbar to actually disable some or ALL the styles applied to the page. If disabling Crystal related styles (or all) makes your missing toolbar appear, then it's probably a conflict in your CSS. A front end developer would know to adjust the styles (i.e. add the !important directive to a style, change class/id names, etc.) to address this.

    Alternatively, FireBug may be reporting JavaScript errors (heck, even FireFox can show these in the console) which could indicate a problem that prevents the completion of rendering your toolbar.

    An outside possibility is that the report itself contains mark-up. For example, if you had certain fields in the report contain HTML that happened to be rendered by the browser, this could create an open div tag, css styles and even JavaScript that would do all the stuff I explained above.

    I hope this narrows it down for you. Happy troubleshooting!