Expiration of CrystalReport Viewer pages with long running queries

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.