master detail subreport fast in designtime preview but slow at run time

rbuser

We have a report with two drilldown subreports. The two drilldown subreport
detail queries are linked to the master by materfield links in the pipeline.
At designtime the report comes up very fast and the drill downs work at
speed ok. However at run time they crawl and it shows calculating page one
for ages and the drilldowns also take an age to appear and disappear. The
is with the queries remaining active from designtime so there is no change.

Is there something different that the tppreport does at runtime that could
cause this slowdown given that the queries are still the same?

nicocizik

Hi Paul,

There should not be any difference between design-time and runtime. Are you
able to see this behavior with the drilldown demo included with
ReportBuilder. If so please give me the exact steps you are taking. Also,
if you are able to recreate this problem with a simple example I can run on
my machine, please send it in .zip format to support@digital-metaphors.com
and I'll take a look at it for you.

--
Regards,

Nico Cizik
Digital Metaphors
http://www.digital-metaphors.com

rbuser

We've just upgraded RB to 10.03 and now find that the design time preview is
just as slow as runtime so 10.03 is slower than 9. We'll email off the
exact sample with data files.

rbuser

Nico

Thanks for looking at the sample. However we still have numerous problems
with subreports begin very slow to display both in drilldown and non-drill
down. I'm pretty sure that the answer to this is to be able to use the
delphi master-detail dataset relationship as since delphi has been out, this
has always worked successfully for me. The key to this is for the detail
table only to be accessed during the actual drilldown. I.e. as RB is
passing through the master table, the detail table should be inactive so
that it won't be constantly evaluated on each master record change. This is
effectively a standard listing report. Then and only then when the
drilldown is activated should the detail dataset be activated. Is this
possible for me to control?

nicocizik

Hi Paul,

Thank you for pointing this out. We will take a look at possibly enhancing
this for a later release of ReportBuilder. As for now, there are a couple
options to try.

1. Take a look at the following example of manually drilling down the
detail. This shows how to use Delphi parameters to manually display the
detail information using a JITPipeline. Doing something similar in your
application could speed things up.

http://www.digital-metaphors.com/tips/DrillDownManualDetail.zip

2. Using your example I disconnected the MasterDataPipeline of the
subreport in the Report.AfterOpenDataPipelines event. Then using the
technique used in the following example, I manually executed the drill down
of this subreport using my own label. At the beginning of the
OnDrawCommandClick event however I reassigned the master pipeline and called
DBPipeline.LocateLinkedDataFirst. This speeds up the initial load time
however the drill down time remains the same.

--
Regards,

Nico Cizik
Digital Metaphors
http://www.digital-metaphors.com

nicocizik

Sorry, the second example can be downloaded here...

http://www.digital-metaphors.com/tips/DrillDownSubreportManualControl.zip

--
Regards,

Nico Cizik
Digital Metaphors
http://www.digital-metaphors.com

rbuser

Thanks I'll have a look at it as soon as I can. Your help is invaluable...

rbuser

I can't find any info on the expansions routines - is there any
documentation about them?

nicocizik

Hi Paul,

There are help topics available for the TppSubreport.ExpandAll,
TppReport.ExpandDrillDowns, and TppReport.CollapseDrillDowns routines. Whey
expansion routines are you speaking of?

--
Regards,

Nico Cizik
Digital Metaphors
http://www.digital-metaphors.com