Submit Your Suggestions for Vista

Eric,

If existing customers were limited to only 90 seconds to run Crystal Reports for any reason it would be considered a defect and would have been fixed by now. There is no way anyone would call it new functionality. The comment was worded the way it was because this is a "suggestion box" and the ticket we originally submitted was ignored as a defect and turned into an existing issue tied to a suggestion. 

The issue has existed for more then 2 years and is being tied to "too much data" when in reality that is not the root cause of the problem. It may be a contributing factor but it's the hard timeout on the control. 

The example you request depends on which of the numerous reports we have that fall under this. In our case the issues doesn't have anything to do with the amount of data, it's just the length of time for processing. The query side takes 10-15 on some, 90 seconds on others. Some of them are cross tab style reports that when exported to excel take a tremendous amount of time to render so the 90 seconds is used up almost entirely by the render time. 

At this point anyone suffering from this issue would be happy to just have a longer timeout hardcoded into the software as a fix to at least get more then 90 seconds to play with. My comment was worded the way it is because it wasn't being considered a defect, so I felt the only path forward to get any attention was to detail what is actually happening and at least try and provide a suggestion to fix.

Thank you for the submission.  The way that we define defects is that they are issues with the way the product is designed today that require only the correction of existing functionality to address, not the creation of new functionality to address.  By adding a way to set the timeouts to be configurable, we need to create additional functionality that is not currently present.  As such, this needs to be prioritized with the rest of the backlog.  Of course, the easiest/ most likely thing we can do is to increase the overall timeout value.

Just out of curiosity, how long does the report take to generate for your when you access the report URL directly?

Providing comment because I'm of the opinion that this suggestion (related to case #61216 ) is ultimately a bug that could be quickly fixed in Vista.

The issue is that SSRS reports are delivered to the Vista interface through the SSRS viewer provided by sql server and embedded in a vista window. What most people will actually find is that the report is timing out after 90 seconds. This same timeout limit is not present through the web interface into SSRS. 

The SSRS report viewing control has a AsyncPostBackTimeOut setting that defaults to 90 seconds. Anything that takes more then 90 seconds, whether it be the query to run the report or the rendering when export will fail if it takes more then 90 seconds.

Viewpoint could fix this problem and fulfill this suggestion in 2 possible ways:

1) Allow the SSRS report viewer timeout to be configurable by the customer through a VA Site Settings type of interface. Or they could extend the hard coded value to something higher.

2) As more of a workaround, modify the report titles interface and allow a setting to deliver the report through a web browser to be managed at the report level instead of only in the VA User Profile level. By delivering the report through the browser you bypass the timeout but also do not require the system wide setting of delivering ALL reports through the browser. 

I attached an article to this comment with a more detailed description of this problem.