Compare Report Processing Time - any formulas or tools?

[thementornetwork]

Right now I am manually capturing the start time of a report and end time of a report by looking at the clock.
It does not take too much effort to get a start time but getting an accurate end time can be a pain as I have to constantly flip back and forth between the stuff I am working on and the report I am running to see if it has finished generating.

Recently I have to do a bunch of performance comparisons between various Crystal Reports and this process has become even more tedious.

Is there a way to write a formula that could capture the exact start time when I hit the Refresh Data button as well as the time the report finishes to generate. It would be even better if there is a way to capture the break down of the duration of Accessing Database time and the duration of Reading Records time.

Or is there any software out there that could do that for me?

We are running Crystal Reports against a Cache DB. Thank you.

 

[kray4660]

I do not know what version of CR you are running. But CR 11 (maybe older versions also). Under the Report menu item has Performance Information. I do not know if this would work for you.

 

[thementornetwork]

I have CR 11 and I know about the Performance Information but I am not sure how accurate the numbers are. Also it does not seem to capture the timestamp of the time it was launched and when it finished. I am hoping for more complete information to do analysis.

Also we develop Crystal Reports to be integrated with a 3rd party Account Receivable software and the run time of the reports launched from that program may differ from the run time we get from running reports directly via Crystal Reports installed on our desktop. I am wondering if there are tools out there that could track the data I need because the Performance Information will not be applicable in case reports are run out of the AR software.

 

[kray4660]

We have never had the need for any performance tracking. I do recall over the years people asking about performance tracking, but I do not remember what the solutions were (if any).

 

[IanWaterman]

Just tried this and it seems to work, surprisingly ;-)
Create two formula @Printstart and @printend

Populate both with

Whileprintingrecord;
currentdatetime;

However, on thinking about this its only time to print and I don't think starts at the point of making data request.

Though it does work for Reports containing subreports so you could make your report a subreport in a container report and add these two formulae to the container report.

Ian

 

[IdoMillet]

At least one of the 3rd-party Crystal Reports UFLs (User Function Libraries) listed at

http://kenhamady.com/bookmarks.html

allows you to write to a text file (or to an ini file or to a database) via a formula placed on your report layout.

hth,
- Ido

view, export, burst, email, and schedule Crystal Reports.

http://www.MilletSoftware.com

 

[epmo]

I am using R-tag viewer. It shows start/end time and other information about each report - parameter values, workstation, how many times a report was used etc. It is perfect to plan report optimizations since you can easily find the list of slowest most used reports, how much time per period each report takes etc. What I love about it is that it doesn't require any changes in the report; the data is collected behind the scenes. The only disadvantage is that the information will be collected just for the reports started with the viewer.