ServerObjectExtension to export Crystal Report to pdf

I ran into a problem creating a pdf with AGS9.2. When I export a layout, the TableFrame elements do not appear. This seems to be a known issue/limitation. OK, fine, I thought, I’ll just use crystal reports to export a Dataset to pdf via the ReportDocument. But nooo, I kept getting an exception saying :”Access to report file denied. Another program may be using it”.

I tried several workarounds. But none solve the problem. So I went ahead and wrote a server object extension and it worked just fine. Seems like Crystal Reports XI just doesn’t like running within the ASPNET process space. Fortunately, the same code ran just fine within the SOC. Next step is concatenating the layout pdf onto the report pdf with aspose pdf.