Changing Crystal Report Timeouts

Author:  Aaron Hampshire and Eric Vasbinder

Overview

From time to time when moving into the cloud, a customer may find certain Crystal reports that are "long running".  In other words, Crystal reports that, due to the volume of data retrieved from the database by the system or due to other factors such as network slowness, take longer than 4-5 minutes to run.  When running reports of this length, a user may encounter timeouts when the time it takes to generate the report exceed the length of time that Crystal Reports are allowed to run in our cloud.  By default, our cloud environments may be configured to either 10 or 20 minutes for Crystal Reports timeouts depending upon the version of Vista that was originally installed.

To that end, customers can often find it beneficial to manually force a longer timeout period for those users in their environments that heavily make use of Crystal Reports.  The below instructions will give you instructions on how to perform this change.

Updating Crystal Timeouts

Please perform the following steps in order to change the Crystal Reports timeout for a specific user.

NOTE:  If needed, these steps may be automated for deployment through InTune or other device management solutions.

Steps

1. Browse to the local file directory, "C:\Program Files (x86)\Viewpoint Construction Software\Vista".

2. Locate the XML config file, "Viewpoint.Vista.Launcher.exe.config" and open it in your favorite text editor.

3. Locate the section "<appSettings>" in the inside.

4. You should see a comment section that says, "<!--  Remove the comment on the line below to override the default value -->  <!--  <add key="CRYSTAL_REPORT_TIMEOUT" value="25"  />  -->"

5. Please edit the value of the timeout in minutes that you would like (e.g. 30 for 30 minutes) and then remove the comment from around the key.

6. When you are complete, your line may look like this:

 <add key="CRYSTAL_REPORT_TIMEOUT" value="30"  />

7.  See below for a screenshot of the above instructions.

Caveats

Please note that if this setting does not work, your environment may be impacted by an app server or Crystal Report node level timeout setting that is handled in IIS.  To increase the IIS level timeout on the app server or your Crystal reporting node(s) (used if you have Enterprise Architecture), please create a cloud support ticket requesting an increased IIS timeout to allow for longer running report sessions.