Freezing while loading report preview? (Database view)

Antanella Tirone

Good morning everyone! For the last few months, I have been experiencing an extremely frustrating problem. About half the time I try to run a report and preview the results before printing, the entire system freezes. I then fall into a loop of disconnecting and re-connecting. I've let it go for a few hours while working on something not in RE to see if it's just a lag, but it never actually loads the report. Instead, I have to open the Citrix connection center, and disconnect the session.

The weirder part is that most times when I reopen the database view, the report will give me an error that says “The header and footer are too big for the page”. But, it doesn't do that every time. Sometimes I reopen RE and it previews the report without any issues at all, even if I don't change the header/footer size. Most, if not all, of the reports I run were made by the person who held my position before me, so I have done nothing to change the header/footer content except to update the year.

Has anyone else had this problem? Does anyone have any suggestions? As you can imagine, this has made running donor statement reports an absolute nightmare and I'm at my wit's end trying to work around it.

Crystal Bruce

@Antanella Tirone Hi! Have you reached out to Blackbaud support to report this issue? I want to make sure they are aware and you are getting the help you need. Thanks!

Christine Robertson 4

@Antanella Tirone When this happens, I wonder if your report criteria is broad. Particularly with a pledge report, if the report includes a wide time frame, the processing can be extremely slow. I would absolutely still report this to support, but I would check your criteria and also test this on another computer as well as on another internet connection (if you're working from home, maybe try in the office, etc.). Knowing those details will help you in your conversation with support.

Dana Burton

@Antanella Tirone, I agree with Crystal and Christine. Definitely reach out to customer support. I've had problems that were known issues and, when possible, they gave me a work around until the issue was resolved. Other times, they dug into our data looking at why the issue was happening.

Christine touched on this database article: https://kb.blackbaud.com/knowledgebase/Article/37973

Antanella Tirone

@Crystal Bruce Hi Crystal! If I remember correctly, we had a similar issue with Financial Edge a while back that was reported to Blackbaud support, but I'm not certain how that was resolved. I'll reach out to our accounting team for an update, and see if they can help!

Antanella Tirone

@Christine Robertson Hi Christine! Our internet can definitely be a little finicky. We work in an office, but all of our actual work is done through a cloud server. I have had little luck with using RE outside of the cloud, but I can give that a try and see if there's a difference.

As for the report criteria, I have noticed no particular pattern. It happened with a single donor tax statement I needed to reprint, as well as with a large group from a query. It's not very consistent, which has made tracking down the problem difficult. Either way, I'll try to start keeping a log of when it happens so I can bring it to support. Thank you!

Antanella Tirone

@Dana Burton Hi Dana! Thanks for the link, I had some horrible luck trying to search Knowledgebase for this issue in particular. I'll look through a little more thoroughly tomorrow!