Crystal Reports with NXT

Michele Thompson 2

I have what may be a pretty unique problem. We have recently converted to NXT. I have several Crystal Custom Reports that we use - almost daily. Now with NXT we have to go into Crystal differently. It seems to be working ok except for one report. This report, of course, is HUGE! It is actually a report that we upload each week into IMODULES, which we use for our website and online donations. We created a Member Portal and this Crystal report updates the portal each week. 


Now my problem, the last couple of weeks it has frozen upon export, or like today, almost finished and then it says it failed and did not export.This export takes 2 to 2-1/2 hours to export. Needless to say, it is extremely frustrating. Especially since this is how we update our member portal. So my question is, does anyone else do anything like this? Is there a way your donors can look at their profile and see their giving, membership, and general information?


I am not a Crystal guru - I can work enough in it to be dangerous but to fix complex issues I am lost. When Blackbaud stopped supporting Crystal over a year ago, I knew it would be a struggle. I am not sure where to go with this. This report is so complex that if I move a field even one tiny bit it would mess it up completely.


Thanks for any advice!

Michele

Steven Cianciarulo

I know with NXT there's an issue with reports and exports that take a long time to run where the user is logged out for inactivity before it can complete. I believe you can contact support and they can temporarily disable the timeout, but you'll have to get in touch with them every single time. This is one of the reasons we are not considering NXT at this time.

Jonathan Angell

Hi Michele


A couple of troubleshooting things to try (apologies if you've thought of these already):

1) Can you minimise the records that the report is working on by altering the query it is based on?  e.g. only work on surnames beginning with Z, or similar. This should address whether it is a time-out issue (as the report should run quickly), or a file path problem (we have had Crystal Reports fail because of long/bad file paths or, sometimes, someone has the Report's mdb database open in another report).  If you still get the error after minimising the records, then it may be a file path issue.

2) Try running via Queue - this should, I think, avoid the time out problem Steven mentioned.

3) When we moved our Crystal reports to NXT, we had to remember to change the file paths so that the report used the mdb file from the Blackbaud hosting area, rather than our own network drive - otherwise we received similar messages to yours, I believe.


Hope those help to diagnose the problem...


Best wishes

Jon

Jean Weyandt

My exports were also failing when exporting large amounts of data to an Excel file. I was told to export to a csv and that has worked for me.

John Heizer

Jean Weyandt‍   Unfortunately exporting to CSV loses much of the functionality, like one-to-many relationships, needed for complex Crystal Reports.

Bill Ochs

I get a similar problem, but I am not running NXT or Crystal.  The report, or export, will simply hang with an unhelpful error message stating that an object of some sort cannot be found.  What is actually wrong is that I have used up too much space on Blackbaud's server.  To solve the issue, I use FileZilla on the ftp site to delete as many of the saved exports CREATED BY MY LOGIN as I can - especially the large ones - and then rerun the export.  That seems to fix it.  I run into this problem about three times per year, and always use this same trick to the fix it.