Wow! It worked…

I continue my journey with Crystal Reports Viewer (CRV) inside ASP.Net pages.
Topic of this post is to discuss problems and solutions related to long running queries in CRV.

I would like to thank Daniel Paulsen from SAP team for his help resolving the issue discussed below.

What are we talking about here?

As it usually happens at some point there is to much data/not optimal query/broken indexes/etc and it is takes significant time to return a result for CR report. As a result ASP.Net page with CRV start to throw errors, acts erratically, and overall strange.

Since we know that it is ASP.net and CRV uses page state and session information then we have usual suspects – session timeout and execution timeout.

Easy? Not so fast… Lets time our query – if it is more then 10 but less then 20 minutes then reason is not an ASP.Net timeout, but CR Engine timeouts.

Crystal Reports Engine Timeouts

Aside from timeouts imposed by .net infrastructure, there are two others which are introduced by Crystal Report itself.

Symptoms:

  • Error similar to ‘Request timed out because there has been no reply from the server in N ms’
  • First Page of the report is displayed but attempt to go to the next page gives JS error related to invalid object ID
  • If report require parameter entry, they are requested again

Cause:

Crystal Reports by default has a timeout of 10 minutes (600,000 ms) before deciding that no data is returned by the query.
Depend on how code behind is implemented for the report page, timeout error may cause different problems and be hidden.

Solution:

Per Daniel’s suggestion I have changed the following settings to a bigger number and it did solve the problem for me

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Business Objects\Suite 12.0\Report Application Server\Client SDK\CorbaAdapter\WaitReplyTimeout = 600000

and

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Business Objects\Suite 12.0\Report Application Server\InprocServer\EnterpriseRequestTimeout = 600000

Final Note:

There are other settings which are allowed to be set for the CR engine as described in Developer’s Guide for CR 2008 under “Configuring your Web.Config file“. It worth to know about some of them.


2 Comments

Karen · Dec 1, 2011 at 23:29

Hi, I am running a vendor application which has been written in ASP.net. It is used to view uploaded crystal reports. The issue is some of the reports having long running queries which eventually get failed when viewed using the application but no issue when running on CR. There is no error message being logged except the application custom error message saying it failed. Could you please advise what could be the issue? Unfortunately, there is no access to the application source code to determine the root cause of it except some possibility on changing some settings outside the source code. Thanks !

    Serguei Dosyukov · Dec 2, 2011 at 12:00

    Since it is vendor provided application I would suggest opening support ticket with them.
    In the end they may need to finetune application (web.config or registry) setttings for you and it should be done by them. Tempering with the system may make things worse.

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