10.4 Precautions and Safeguards

When you develop reports for an enterprise deployment, you should take precautions to restrict user actions that might negatively affect server performance. The following are some examples of potential problems:

Most reports contain certain parameters that can be specified by the user at runtime. However, a user might unwittingly set a combination of parameters that retrieves a very large number of records, which could impact database performance.

Users can create and modify reports using Ad Hoc reporting tools, which include the capability to modify filtering conditions. Again, a user might unwittingly change or remove a filter in such a way that the report retrieves an excessive number of records.

Many reports make heavy use of scripting, and user modification of such reports (using the Ad Hoc tools) can have undesirable results.

To prevent these kinds of potential problems, consider taking the following precautions when you design your reports.

Disabling Ad Hoc Analysis

Deselect the 'Enable Adhoc Analysis' option in the Data Options tab of a component 'Properties' dialog box to prevent a user from modifying that report component using the Ad Hoc tools. This may be necessary, for example, when Ad Hoc modifications could conflict with a script that is attached to the element.

Limiting the Maximum Number of Rows

Set the 'Maximum Number of Rows' option in the Data Options tab of a component 'Properties' dialog box to limit the number of rows returned by the raw query. This limit overrides all other maximum settings defined in Style Studio or Enterprise Manager.

Setting a Query Timeout

Set the 'Query Timeout' option in the Data Options tab of a component 'Properties' dialog box to specify the amount of time (in seconds) allowed for query execution. If no response is received from the database within this time, the reporting engine will attempt to cancel the execution of the query by the database, and will then proceed to complete report execution. (It may not be possible to cancel the query in all cases.)

 

Limiting the Maximum Number of Pages

It is especially important to limit the maximum number of pages for prototype reports that will be used by the Ad Hoc Wizards.

Specify a value for the 'Max Number of Pages' option in the 'Report Properties' dialog box to restrict the number of pages generated by the report engine. (See Report Properties for more details.) Although you can also limit the raw number of records returned by a query (as discussed above), in some cases an Ad Hoc report user can make layout selections that nevertheless would generate a very large number of pages. Therefore, it is still valuable to set a maximum page limit.

See Also

Limiting Query Size and Execution Time, in Administration Reference, for global safeguards.

Limiting the Number of Rows in a Table, in Data Mashup, for Worksheet-level safeguards.

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