Crystal 8.5 hangs during print preview

[JEfromCanada]

I have a report where the detail area contains 4 subreports. These four subreports are placed on top of eachother, so that the net effect is that ONE of the reports will result in visible output.

The subreports are fairly simple. Debugged on their own, they each work properly. When print previewing the main report, the process continues for approximately 80 detail lines, and then the process "hangs". By that, I mean that there is an indication that more pages of output exist, but clicking on the "next page" icon does not advance the report.

I have seen this behavior on several reports, but don't understand why it's happening. Anyone else seen this, and know what to do to make it stop. I've already tried Crystal's KnowledgeBase, but nothing there is helping.

One more thing... I have already analyzed the transaction that "hung". When the transactions are reordered (so that the "hanging one" appears earlier in the stream) the report DOES print that transaction, and hangs somewhere else.

Thanks.

 

[synapsevampire]

Crystal might be waiting for you to click the next page before continuing.

If you're able to click the next page button, then the report isn't hung, it's probably very inefficient (subreports) and it's requerying the database times the number of subreports.

Try to avoid subreports and offload everything to the database whenever possible.

-k

 

[JEfromCanada]

That's not quite the symptom. The "next page" icon is available, but when I click it, the current page number stays the same (i.e. it doesn't advance to the next page).

Another way to see the "hang" state is when you click on the "last page" icon. The page numbers will count up [ for example: 1 of 2+, 1 of 3+, ..., 1 of 18+] until they get to a certain point. Then, they'll stop increasing, and the "last page" icon does NOT go dim. When it reaches that point, I can click "next page" as many times as I want, but once it gets to page 18, it won't advance any further.

The subreports are trivial - they don't take long to execute - so I get to the "point of hanging" quite quickly. If there was going to be another page coming, it would not take that long to get there.

 

[nagornyi]

My feeling is that subreports or the report content at all don't have anything to do with the problem. Something on the system.. Is the problem consistent and happening on other machines? Did you try to install other pinters and printer drivers? Did you check for any Windows problems, like with Norton WinDoctor?

 

[JEfromCanada]

That's a good question, nagornyi. There are many machine configurations on our network. I myself work remotely (telecommute), and I cannot actually print at all at my location. However, the symptom I am getting is on the print preview. I have heard that other users in the office see the same problem, but they are all running the report off the Terminal Server, so in effect, we are all using the same "base hardware".

When I disable all subreports, I make it all the way through the entire data set. When I start to enable subreports selectively, I can proceed to a point (the number of records I am able to process varies with how many, and exactly which, of the subreports are active).

When the subreports are tested on the workbench without the host report, they all run to completion. There are no null fields or anything else tricky that cause the subreports to hiccup. I have also verified the data sources to ensure there are no null fields in the database (even if there were, I check for them - but there aren't any).