Problems exporting a 3305 page report (95000 records) using Crystal Reports 8 to RTF/Word/Excel

Question

I'm having problems exporting a 3305 page report (95000 records) using CR 8 to RTF.

When exporting a TXT file, it works.

But...

When exporting a large RTF, the program hangs at about 42% of the export process. Later it frees up the system, appears to finish, and outputs a file. The file itself is not complete (many records missing), and the formatting is gone (everything displays vertically, one word on top of another).

My setup has Windows XP SP2; Intel Pentium CPU 2.8G; about 512 RAM.. on another machine with twice that amount it only got to 43%.

When exporting a large DOC, the Reports module hangs at about 63% of the export process. Later it frees up the system, and outputs a file. The file itself is in Word 2.0, and I cannot open it on my screen.

Excel 8 is also a no go

Upgrading CR is not an option for me at this point.

The customer wants this feature to work, and is not presently willing to filter the report and export in smaller chunks (the nature of their work requires them to have it as one single document with a single date stamp at the bottom of the page, and other reasons.).

It seems like it could be a memory issue.

I also wonder if there isn't any limits to the size of an RTF, WORD or EXCEL file. I think EXCEL is only good up to 65000+ records per worksheet.

Any ideas?

P.S. - I had a look at the other suggested topics similar to this, and did not find the answer was looking for.

I also sent an email to Crystal Reports, but I think they're now owned by another company, which I wonder is support version 8. I thought I read elsewhere they were not. Does anyone know who is still supporting version 8?

Answer 1

Excel (pre-2007), at least, does have a max record count, and I think it's 65386 rows (Excel 2007: 1,048,576 rows and 16,384 columns). There may be similar limitations with Word, but I would think that's unlikely, and that the limitations are a result of the exporting functionality from your version of Crystal... Also, I'm pretty sure you're SOL with getting support from SAP (owns CR) for version 8. In my travels working with Crystal Reports (from a distance), I've seen many issues with exporting from CR that have been (recently) corrected with updates the the ExportModeler library; Good luck with finding some help with CR8; even though you'd mentioned upgrading CR is not an option, I think it'd be your only recourse... :(

Answer 2

Years ago I had a problem where the temp file that the Crystal Report was generating for very large exports took up all the available space on the hard drive. Check to see how much space you have on you temp drive (usually C:). You can also watch the disk space as the export occurs to see if it is chewing up the space. It wil lmagically stall (e.g. 42% complete) when it gets down to almost zero. After the process fials, the temp file is deleted and you disk space goes back to normal.