Troubleshoot Report Issues

Error Messages

If an error occurs, begin troubleshooting by determining which pages are involved. For example, if the Customers page links to the Orders page, and the Orders page links to the Order Details page, then the error may have occurred on any of these pages. Dynamic views can change which links appear on a given page.

Once the pages have been identified, determine which views are being used to build the report. The page can have a report view and that view overrides the Horizontal or Vertical View. Reporting honors dynamic views. From within SQL Server Query Analyzer or Management Studio, test the views by selecting all the records from each view.

If a page has a report view, ensure that it contains all the necessary columns. An error can occur if the page has an Order By statement that references a column that is not in the report view. Refer to Create Report Views for more information.

Performance

Reporting is resource intensive. Almost by definition, reports contain more data than any given Dynamic page. This is why DSP® has two separate properties to control the maximum number of records per page, one for Dynamic pages and one for Report pages. These parameters are configurable on the Parameters page on the Search Options tab. The default display limit is 1000; the default report limit, 10,000. Consider lowering these values from their defaults.

In addition to the data set size, the number of sub-requests issued by the report generator can create a bottleneck. The report generator interacts with DSP® in much the same way as clicking links. However, it typically makes many more requests than a user in a shorter time span.

A page can contain hundreds of records and each record can link to another page, resulting in hundreds of requests built to a single report. If the down-level page then links to another page, thousands of requests can be required to get the data. Requests are serial. If each request takes a second, then generating the final report can take minutes or hours.

One way to bypass this situation is to take links out of the equation. Instead of using links, build a single report view and register it at the top-level page. Use report groups to organize the data. Instead of issuing hundreds or thousands of small requests, the report generator issues one request. Issuing one request that retrieves and organizes a large data set is usually much faster than issuing many small requests.

Finally, it may not be possible to generate a report for a thousand customers that include all customer orders and order line items. For situations like this, consider disabling page level reports (i.e., disable the Support Report page property). Use the boaReport or Link To Report features to allow users to generate record-level reports. This practice allows users to generate a report for individual customers rather than a report that contains all customers.