Crystal Reports XI hangs when opening a report

Question

I am trying to open a report in Crystal Report 11 Designer (product version 11.5.8.826), but it seems to freeze up. This report use to work fine, but today the client could not load the report.

I also tried to open the report on another developer's workstation, with the same result.

Has this happened to anyone else?

Answer 1

Are you sure all servers referenced in the report are still online? If you've changed database connections on the report, I've seen Crystal store a reference to the old one even when there are no active usages. If the old server is offline, Crystal still tries to connect to it when loading and will hang for a long time. We had a report that used to load in seconds start taking minutes right after an old test server was powered down. Powered it back up, it loaded instantly again, even though all the connections to it were seeming removed. We wound up totally rebuilding the report from scratch.

I found it using Sysinternals TDIMon, it showed connection attempts and timeouts coming from Crystal.

Answer 2

Thanx for the response. I tried as you said, but found nothing out of the ordinary using TDIMon. Also, it is not just one report, it seems to be a couple of our reports, and this not only happens when opening the report in the designer, it happens when opening the report in C# code using the ReportDocument.Load(string filePath). It simply freezes on that line.

Answer 3

We found the answer. We used a program called Wireshark (www.wireshark.org).

We closed down every app, and just ran the wireshark and tried to open the report in the crystal designer.

Then found that it was trying to access the printer spooler service on a box we used, but changed recently to another box. So just restarted the service on the old box, and all is good again

Answer 4

In the page setup menu, you can check the No Printer checkbox and it will no longer have the delay of looking for a printer on the network. I find it often useful to start a report against the Microsoft XPS Document Writer Printer or something along those lines though.

Answer 5

try this "C# code":

ReportDocument rpDoc = new ReportDocument()
rpDoc.Load(Server.MapPath(@"reportname.rpt"));

hope it helps

Answer 6

I've had similar issues open a report and the designer concurrently.

At the time, I didn't have Internet connectivity and the designer was trying (unsuccessfully) to load the web content that is included in the 'Start Page'. Eventually, the timeout was exceeded and the report loaded. I unchecked the 'Show online resources'.

Answer 7

I had the same problem on Crystal Reports 2008 (XII)! I tryed to stop the Windows printer spooling service while CR was freezed and got instantly an anwer freom CR (Printer not.. blah blah using default...blah)

After that, i removed the 'Printer-checkbox' in page setup (answer above). After that i had no problem loading this Report in CR Designer and also the C# ReportDocument.Load(string filePath) worked fine....