I have followed the steps in the “Getting Started with .rpt Inspector Online” page, successfully downloaded the Broker and ran it once the Browser Tool told me to do so.
I’m able to successfully log in to the tool in the browser, and get the “No Data” screen as expected from the “Getting Started” guide, but when I click on “Add Report(s)” for the next step in the “Getting Started”, the Broker shuts itself down and I have to reopen it and log into it once again. After this, the browser tool window appears, but it gets stuck on endlessly loading. I can’t seem to do anything else, so I’m unable to use the Tool.
@becker welcome to the .rpt Inspector Online community and sorry for the issues you’re encountering.
The .rpt Inspector Online broker needs to be running on your local Windows environment in order for the browser to be able to navigate your drives / folders and add the Crystal Reports.
the Broker shuts itself down and I have to reopen it and log into it once again. After this, the browser tool window appears, but it gets stuck on endlessly loading.
Of course that shouldn’t be happening and troubling that’s its shutting down. When exactly does it do that? I mean does it shutdown right away when you click on Add reports or does it show the list of drives and folders in the browser and then the broker shuts down?
If you’re not even seeing any drives and folders come up in the browser and the broker has shutdown then, if I had to guess it’s running in to some sort of issue with processing the list of your drives and/or top level folders. In which case, as a test if you could simplify the connected devices (i.e. disconnect any USB drives, disconnect network shares, etc.) to rule that out and try again it would help. If that helps, please do let us know and we’ll work with you to narrow it down and get a solution in place.
Also, as there are multiple versions of Windows 10, can you please let us know the exact one you have? You can easily get that by running the System Information application and in the System Summary it will display the version, i.e. 10.0.18363 Build 18363
I’ve tried what you’ve suggested and disconnected my network drives down to the only one where I expect .rpt files to be, before trying again, and that makes it load properly. I guess the problem was there were too many folders to search through so it would take way too long to complete its loading.
To answer your other questions though:
The Broker was shutting down immediately upon clicking “Add Reports”, so no list of drives/folders was ever shown. It just immediately went into the loading wheel.
My Windows 10 version is 10.0.18363 Build 18363
I guess you can consider this problem resolved, although I would wonder if there’s a way to pre-filter my drives before clicking “Add Report” so I wouldn’t need to disconnect all of them any time I want to use the tool.
I guess you can consider this problem resolved, although I would wonder if there’s a way to pre-filter my drives before clicking “Add Report” so I wouldn’t need to disconnect all of them any time I want to use the tool.
Disconnecting your drives was only a temporary suggestion to help narrow things down, not something we would expect you to work through all the time. We’d like to continue working with you to examine this further in hopes of identifying the exact issue and getting a fix in for a future version. If you’re willing to, we’d like to schedule a screen sharing session?
I’ve tried what you’ve suggested and disconnected my network drives down to the only one where I expect .rpt files to be, before trying again, and that makes it load properly. I guess the problem was there were too many folders to search through so it would take way too long to complete its loading.
I don’t think that many folders is necessarily the issue as it only scans the top level items at a time. i.e. the first set of items are the drives, and then once you double click on the drive then it retrieves the top level folders only from that drive, then when you double click a folder, it will read the top level folders in there, and so on. If you don’t have an additional local drives that you’ve disconnected (i.e. USB) then perhaps it’s may have something to do with the kind of network drives or 1 of them that is tripping it up. Are these SMB of NFS network shares? And how many of them in total do you normally have?
An update: today we wanted to see how the tool would handle more reports, since I’ve seen some posts here on the forums of other users working with hundreds of reports at a time, so I tried adding 100 reports. It took maybe half an hour but it did end up with all 100 being added successfully, so I didn’t run into the problem I described in my post yesterday of it crashing partway through.
However, once I clicked “Ok” on the pop-up window, it closed that window and showed a “Loading” message in the reports pane, which stayed that way for over an hour. I noticed during that time, a few times something would quickly flash then disappear, I think it was the “Broker is offline” window, but I couldn’t see for sure since it disappeared so quickly. I refreshed the page and was prompted to log back into the tool, and when I did it showed me that 99 reports had been added, so I added the missing report and went to try and change the data source.
Once I got into the Change Data Source menu, I tried changing all 100 in one batch, and now I’ve been stuck on the “Processing Report(s)” window for over an hour, and again I’ve seen that quick flash of something. I’m wondering if this is expected behaviour or if it should be operating faster than this, or if it’s crashing and just not displaying that?
Thanks again for the reply. If it would help resolve the issue, I’d be willing to do a screen sharing session. I don’t have any local drives other than my C: drive (USB or otherwise), and I normally have 14 network drives connected. I don’t know how to check for what type of network drive they are, but Googling it tells me that Windows usually uses SMB so that would be my guess.
I also ran into another issue in the time between our last messages which might be related: within the “Add Reports” pop-up screen, I was able to see the folder where I have all of the .rpt files, but the “Select All” checkbox for that folder was disabled (maybe on purpose?) so I wasn’t able to try and add all 500 files in that folder.
I settled for adding 36 of them for a trial run, but after about 32 had been processed, the browser tool said that the Broker had become disconnected and that I needed to login to it again, even though on the Broker itself it said I was still logged in. I closed the Broker and reopened and logged back into it, which got rid of the browser problem, but then it got stuck trying to add the 33rd report for a long time so I just refreshed the page, which left me with 32 reports added, and with me able to actually interact with the page again.
@becker thanks so much for the additional insights. It’s absolutely not expected behavior, as you’ve likely seen, many are able to work with significantly more reports without issues.
I’m wondering if this is expected behaviour or if it should be operating faster than this, or if it’s crashing and just not displaying that?
I’ll send you a DM shortly with details to setup the screen share.
The time it takes depends on multiple factors, i.e. speed of your computer, how much memory, size of the reports, how many objects and properties in the report, and your internet speed. Do you know if all of those reports have saved data? And what’s the average size of each report file?
I have the same problem trying to load 1 report ( or 2 reports) from my C drive. I am running Windows 10 Enterprise and using Chrome for a browser (your app does not work with Edge).
Did you ever figure out what the problem is with reports refusing to load? I can tell you the Broker runs and it takes about 30% of the CPU but nothing happens on the browser screen.
We are still investigating why this happens in some environments. Although we make communications over standard port 443, some firewalls / corporate policy block applications which aren’t explicitly whitelisted. As a test, if you’re behind a firewall, are you able to temporarily disable it? If that doesn’t help, we’d need to diagnose it further with you over a screen sharing session. I can send you details in a DM if that’s something you’d like to do.
I have the same problem trying to load 1 report ( or 2 reports) from my C drive.
Which version and build of Edge?
(your app does not work with Edge).
From your System Information application, what is the exact listed version and build as there are multiple releases of Windows 10?
@mb080179 were you able to do the suggested above and can you provide more details on your environment and versions? Can we schedule a screen sharing session to diagnose further?
Also, just tried running with the current Microsoft Edge, version 84.0.522.52 on Windows 10 without any issues.
