The Docentric report viewer offers the option to download Excel and Word files. Unfortunately, the report is rendered three times for this. Since D365 SSRS rendering times are super slow, especially for business reports such as packing slips and invoices, there is an additional wait of a few seconds. On the other hand, most users rarely use these download options. For them, it would be better to re-render the report when using the download feature.
I would like to introduce a new global parameter like ‘Pre-render Office downloads’ to control this behaviour. Having this at the report level would also work.
If I understand correctly, you’re using an SSRS-built design with our Docentric report viewer. This means that SSRS handles all the rendering, and we just display the report it creates. Because of this, we probably can’t re-render the report later or prepare the file for download. But I’ll check with our dev team to see if there’s anything we could do.
Can you let me know how long the rendering times are when using the SSRS-built design with our standard SSRS report viewer?
Also, could you tell me which table you’re getting these times from?
Hi @AmirO
You can see the rendering times in the screen shot of the original post. They are taken from traces.
On the D365 standard report viewer you have the option to export the documents too. These exports are not pre-rendered.
When using a combination of SSRS design and the Docentric viewer, the Docentric viewer renders all export format in advance, because it deletes the pre-processed report data once the viewer opens. On the other hand, the SSRS viewer keeps the pre-processed report data until you close the viewer, which allows re-rendering later. However, we found this wasn’t the best practice because if the connection was lost, the data wasn’t deleted properly.
After talking with my developer, we could add a parameter like ‘Pre-generate export formats for SSRS designs in Docentric viewer’ to User options. This way, users can choose whether to enable or disable document downloads, helping reduce wait times for those who don’t need this feature.
Let us know if that works for you and we would add a vote to this feature in backlog.
We discussed it in product team and as we understand you are not using Docentric templates for these reports, but you are printing SSRS design to the screen. In this case you can set the flags in Docentric report setup as shown on the screenshot. Then the report will be printed to standard report screen viewer which does not pre-generate report in additional output formats.
