Run out of licenses, can do 20 reports in 20 minutes before receiving error

Question

<p>I have a problem with running out of Licenses when using our ASP.NET Web Application.</p><p>Our Web Application exports and opens a Crystal Report to PDF when the user clicks on the report link.  Unfortunately we have only a certain number of licenses available and after each use it&#39;s useless for about 20 minutes!  In a 20 minute period we are able to run up to 20 reports before getting the "out of licenses" error page. </p><p>So if you have 5 users going through multiple reports in a short time we&#39;ve run out of licenses and they have to wait 20 minutes before trying again!?! </p><p>I am trying to find a means of improving this and have a few thoughts on how:</p><ol><li>Close the license being used (and make available to somebody else) once the report is created. <br /><em>We generally do not have 20 <u>concurrent </u>users at any time but in a 20 minute time span we can have over 20 report requests.</em><br /> <br /></li><li>Shorten the time before the license becomes available again (like to 5 minutes) <br /><em>Long enough for even the larger reports to run, but short enough that the chances of 20 reports being requested in a 5 minute period is slim.<br /> <br /></em> </li><li>Save the License use for that particular USER for the period of time (so if they open 1 or 10 reports it all utilizes the same License). <br /><em>This would work fine because it&#39;s a small office of just over 20 users and the chance of everybody accessing reports in that same 20 minutes is very low.<br /> <br /></em> </li></ol><p> If anybody has any ideas, suggestions, hints, or "it can&#39;t be done" I would greatly appreciate it!  We haven&#39;t found anything in the RAS settings and I haven&#39;t found anything that effects the LICENSING in .NET (and using Report.Close() does not free up the license).</p><p> Thanks,</p><p>~Drew </p>

Answer 1

<p>Alright, I seem to have some success in fixing this issue, though it isn&#39;t the 100% best solution. </p><p>I create the ReportDocument in the Global.asax.vb file </p><font size="1" color="#0000ff">
<blockquote />Dim<font size="1"> crpt </font><font size="1" color="#0000ff">As</font><font size="1"> </font><font size="1" color="#0000ff">New</font><font size="1"> CrystalDecisions.CrystalReports.Engine.ReportDocument<br /><font size="1">Session.Contents.Add("crpt", crpt)</font></font></p></font></blockquote><p><font size="1">and then I re-use this in the page that exports the file to PDF and displays it.  Since this is created as a session-level object in Global.asax.vb I reference it in the display page as Session("crpt") and I clean it up by the end of the page but I don&#39;t make the session object into nothing.</font></p><blockquote><p><font size="1">If Not IsNothing(Session("crpt")) Then</font></p><blockquote><p><font size="1">Session("crpt").Close()<br />System.Runtime.InteropServices.Marshal.ReleaseComObject(Session("crpt"))</font></p></blockquote><p><font size="1">End If </font></p></blockquote><p><font size="1">Then on Session End in the Global.asax.vb I clean up the Session variable and call the garbage collection.</font></p><blockquote><p><font size="1">If Not IsNothing(Session("crpt")) Then</font></p><blockquote><p><font size="1">Session("crpt").Close()<br />System.Runtime.InteropServices.Marshal.ReleaseComObject(Session("crpt"))<br />Session("crpt") = Nothing<br />Session("crpt").Dispose()</font></p></blockquote><p><font size="1">End If<br />GC.Collect() </font></p></blockquote><p><font size="1">It seems to be working at this time though there is the limitation that now everybody who enters the web application gets an object whether or not they are going to run reports. </font></p><p><font size="1">The more ideal situation would be for the object to not be created until the user enters the report page or have the page that creates/displays the report to check if the object exists and if it does not to create the object.</font></p>