I have this report which is taking about 15-24 seconds to show in my custom preview form, the preview form will show up blank with the "No Report" label (see image RSS slow loading), then the report will be shown normally.

I know that the data is coming out in less than a second, and the preview form is shown without the report, I have not found a way to display a message to the user letting him/her know that the report is being process.  The code to generate the report is splitted in two classes:

• ServiceCallRouteDataSource.vb will take care of getting the data and pass it to the report with the following code:

'-- Assign the populated datasource from the Dialog Browser to the Report Manager Object.
ReportManagerObject.DataSources.Item(reportDataSourceName) = Me.DataSource
ReportManagerObject.DataSources.Item(reportApplianceDataSourceName) = Me.DataSource.SourceBO.SC_Appliances
'-- Prepare Report to run
ReportManagerObject.Reports(Me.PerpetuumSoftReportName).Prepare()

• ReportEngine.vb will actually run the report in the custom preview form like this:

Public Shared Function RunReport(ByVal ReportName As FixTrackReports, _
ByVal ReportManagerObject As PerpetuumSoft.Reporting.Components.ReportManager, _
Optional ByVal tBDStringValue As String = "", _
Optional ByVal tEmployeePK As Int64 = 0) As Boolean
     Dim reportDataSourceObject As IReportDataSource
     '-- Get the data source for the report
     reportDataSourceObject = GetReportDataSource(ReportName)
     '-- Populate the data source
     If reportDataSourceObject.PopulateDataSource(ReportManagerObject, tBDStringValue, tEmployeePK) Then
          Dim f As New ReportViewerDialog()
          '-- Set the Report Viewer source with the Report to be used.
          f.rptViewer.Source = ReportManagerObject.Reports(reportDataSourceObject.PerpetuumSoftReportName)
          f.Title = MicroFour.StrataFrame.Tools.Common.GetEnumDisplayValue(ReportName)
          f.TitleDetailText = ""
          f.ShowDialog()
          Return True
     Else
          MicroFour.StrataFrame.Messaging.MessageForm.ShowMessageByKey("NoDataForReport")
          Return False
     End If
End Function

I have other simple reports which generates faster, so I must be missing something in my whole process.  I will appreciate if somebody can see what am I missing here?

Thanks.

Once the RSS engine is handed the data set, it will genereate the report pretty fast.  The slow part always comes when gathering data.  We gather all data prior to caling the report itself.  We have a unique stored procedure for each report that we create that gathers all of the result sets and is optimized to make sure that the loading of the data is fast.  So you need to figure out where your slowness is.

How long is it taking to gather the result sets alone?  This is generally the slow spot.  Are you creating sprocs (genreally a good idea to improve performance)?  Also, are you show a "generating report dialog" while RSS is generating the report?  They have one by default that you can show, but we created our own and you can replace theirs.  They have an implementation called IRenderSite that you can use to create a render status.  When you call the ReportSLot.Prepare method, you can supply class that implements IRenderSite that will show dialog that you create (if that is what you want to do).  This way you can at least see that the rendering is taking place.

Well I have a Custom Field Property "CustomerBuildingAddress" used like this:

GetData("ServiceCallProfileDS.CustomerBuildingAddress")+ " Apt " + GetData("ServiceCallProfileDS.Apt_No")

I did a simple test and use the Building Adress FK an ran the report and it took 11 Secs instead of 37 Secs.  Here is the code for the Custom Field Property which I created in the main bo, not the report bo.

Public ReadOnly Property [CustomerBuildingAddress]() As System.String
     Get
          Dim loBusinessObject As New bizBuildings
          loBusinessObject.FillByPrimaryKey(Me.FK_Buildings)
          If loBusinessObject.Count = 1 Then
               Return String.Format("{0}, {1} {2}", loBusinessObject.Street, loBusinessObject.City, loBusinessObject.State)
          Else
               Return String.Empty
          End If
          loBusinessObject.Dispose()
     End Get
End Property

Yes, I am using a SP (thanks to Dustin for the clarification in another thread).  The gathering of the data takes milliseconds, so it is pretty quick, I think my problem is with the Custom Field Properties, which are really nice, but guess I will need to use another solution to show those lookup fields descriptions.

I was not aware of such dialog, but yes I need to implement it, without it the user gets the impression that no report is being generated or that the system is freeze.  I am using my own ReportViewerDialog and classes logic used in the StrataFlix, it took me some time to digest, but after that and with yours and Ivan help I was able to get it running with RSS, one thing that I also noticed is that after a report has been rendered and the preview form is closed, when a new report is generated, the image of the previous one will be shown until the new process completes the rendering, is there a way to overcome this?

Trent, I have been looking in RSS help file and could not find any reference to this dialog or how to make my report use the default one.  RSS site seems to be down, if possible could you tell me how to make use of the default dialog?

One more question if you don't mind I have some Custom Field Properties (CFP) in the main BO, which when using the BBS builder, will create a report bo inheriting the main bo and then will have those CFP, is there any way to remove those CFP from the report BO?

Overridable would work in my case, since I will refactor those Custom Properties but since they are used in some forms I don't want to redo the whole thing, I want to refactor them for the report only, to see if I can gain some speed in the process.

The slowness was caused by the Custom Field Properties I had in the main BO, following your suggestions I did the following to overcome this issue:

1. Make my main BO CFP overridable.
2. In the report's BO I override the CFP using the logic suggested by Greg to create a temp BO with all the lookup data then seek the one requested by the report.

Here is some of my code used:

''' <summary>
''' Use to hold the Appliance Lookup BO
''' </summary>
''' <remarks></remarks>
Private _ApplianceBOLookup As New Business.bizAppliances
''' <summary>
''' The first time this property is used, it will check the 
''' lookup BO count > 0 if not it will load all the records
''' Then will use the BO.SeekToPrimaryKey to speed up finding
''' the description value.
''' This method is much more faster than using a Custom Field Property in reports.
''' </summary>
''' <remarks></remarks>
Public Overrides ReadOnly Property [ApplianceName]() As System.String
     Get
          If _ApplianceBOLookup.Count = 0 Then
               _ApplianceBOLookup.FillAllRecords()
          End If
          If _ApplianceBOLookup.SeekToPrimaryKey(Me.FK_Appliances) Then
               Return _ApplianceBOLookup.ApplianceName
          Else
               Return String.Empty
          End If
     End Get
End Property

With the above code the time to render the report was reduced from 37 seconds to 3 seconds.  I still need to figure out how to create my own class to implement the IRenderSite, but know that the report is rendering as it should, I will have more time to get that done.

Here you have a sample for the IRenderSite:

http://www.perpetuumsoft.com/ForumTopic.aspx?lang=en&topic_id=356&forum_id=9

Thanks for the link, I had downloaded this project sample before, but it did not work for me.  It is in C# and it is generating 2 compiled errors, which I believe are caused because the project was created for an old version of RSS.

I posted a request for a new sample from them, so let's see.  Thanks anyway for keeping this in mind.

Anyway, I used Trent's report sample and added a RenderSite class to it.

Hope it helps.

Thanks a lot for taking the next step and provide the sample.  It is clear now how it is done, without the sample and the poor help file it would be very difficult for me to really understand this.

Now I can have my own WinRenderDialog wich looks more professional and in synch with the application's look and feel.

Thanks again!

I've got it set to single pass and I do have both a detail and summary report. However for the summary I do all of the grouping and counts in a SQL stored procedure and return just the summary records, which is very fast. I originally did the summarization in RSS but it was very slow. It would appear that even if you can query the data quickly it just takes RSS a substantial amount of time to process a large number of records even if they do not end up being printed.

-Larry

Since I found few performance issues on the RSS forum I decided to do a little testing. The BBS/BO that I'm using is mapped to a view and I select records by date range. The acutal loading of the BO is not an issue, just the rendering time. I ran another set of tests, one set with the SF BBS/BO and the same report and select criteria using an ADO Dataset. The query times were similar but the report rendering times showed a drastic improvement. It would appear that the SF BBS/BO adds additional overhead or there is some issue with RSS using it as a data source. For example 69K records took about 635 seconds to render using a BBS as the datasource but only 23 seconds using a Dataset. The only difference between the two sets of tests in the datasource.

-Larry

I'm using SF v1.7.0.2.  I'm no expert with ANTS memory profiler but I ran two profiles against the same report, one using a BBS and another using a dataset. I took memory snapshots after the data query (my baseline) and after the report finished rendering. What I found was that using the BBS in addition to being significantly slower uses a lot more memory. By the time the report was rendered, I had one instance of the BO for each record retrieved. This resulted in a memory increase of about 42 MB for the BO class. There was also a 45MB increase in the Stack<Delegate> class.  For the BBS the number of bytes in all heaps increased from 50 to 213 MB and Private bytes went from 100MB to 270MB.

In contrast when using a dataset, the number of bytes in all heaps went from 78 to 108 and private bytes went from 123 to 163. It would appear that using a BBS is expensive in terms of memory but I'm not sure if this is the only thing impacting the total rendering time.

Am I the only one having performance issues rendering a large number of records? The BO I'm using for the BBS is very straight forward and doesn't contain any custom fields or scalar methods.  I'm not sure if this is to be expected when using a BBS as a reporting source or if this is a problem that could be fixed. This would be a good point for Trent to jump in.

-Larry