Crystal XI causing reports to take 20+ minutes to open

Question

We use Crystal Reports with TIER (totally integrated electronic record).  Our computer system is part of a state network.  Our TIER programmer lives in another city.  He creates Crystal reports from his location and we create them here at our facility also.  Last week his local server (on the state network) was replaced.  The server in question is not used by us -- our database is located on another server and our reports are also located elsewhere.  Network staff said we should see no impact at all since we do not use that server.  When they took down his local server (they were switching from a novell server to a microsoft server) -- we suddenly developed a problem opening reports.  They would open, but only after 20 minutes or longer.  After much troubleshooting we were able to figure out that any reports the programmer did were the problem.  Any reports created here were opening fine.  Once opened, all reports ran fine and queried the database quickly as usual.  There is no question about how he creates reports versus how we do -- he taught us and has started reports here that do work.  We finally got the network guys to start up the old server in the other city.  As soon as they did, our reports worked correctly again.  We have gotten them to agree to leave that server up while we work this out.  It seems Crystal is automatically tying to the original user's originating server for some reason.  I can't find any place in Crystal to change this.  I opened several reports, re-saved them from here but it didn't change anything.  I also went in through Crystal and Set Datasource Location (updated each field in report), but it didn't help.  I think the reason that isn't working is because there isn't anything wrong with the connection to the database itself.  For whatever reason it is like Crystal is searching for that old server for 20 minutes, finally decides to move on and then the report opens (sorry, not a very technical description).  We use a ton of reports and right now my only option is to rebuild from scratch or ensure the old server is left up and running indefinitely. Does anyone have any idea how to break the apparent automatic connection to that old server?

Answer 1

You are making me think it might be a connection configuration or local machine space/frag issue. Both of these are easy to rule out - does your machine have an automatic maintenance policy (sweep for virus, defragment hard drives, and clean out junk files)?  Can your network techs do a trace test to see if there are bottlenecks in the connection?
I still think you will want to use the data-base expert and find out what the default table bindings are.  You would not need to rebuild the reports, just re-configure the tables and links.  As long as the tables have the same fields and field names on the different source tables you will be fine.
How big are the report templates? (multiple pages, intense graphic loads with charts or formatting, heavy calculations performed on the report level...).  Are they stored remotely or on the local workstation? Remote connections can take a while to get the report to the local machine if not properly configured (even if known to be connected and clear).
The slow too open reports are still indicative of bad links.  You don't have to rebuild the reports, just re point the default source tables.