Session Expire

[Finisher]

i dont know why when everytime i try to view this report my session expires... can somebody give me an idea why and how can i overcome this matter???

thanks in advance...

 

[njitter]

There's a standard session timeout of 20 minutes..this is done to free your license.

---
It's never too late to do the Right thing

 

[Finisher]

yup i know about the 20 minutes standard timeout if no activity... but only when viewing this report which i pass a lot of parameters in the URL that expires, when i pass only few paramaters it was just fine.

 

[njitter]

There is a PDF with information about licences for Crystal Enterprise. It's called 'CE8_LICENSING.PDF'

You may find some info in there...

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It's never too late to do the Right thing

 

[ronnutter]

follow-up questions:

Can you shorten the 20 minute automatic time-out for the standard enterprise? I would like to shorten it to like 3 minutes if possible.

thanks,

 

[njitter]

Ron,

from the PDF:

Anytime a user has a report open in his\her browser using any of the included viewers in CE, a license is
consumed. After 20 minutes of inactivity, the license is automatically released. This behavior is not
configurable.

it's possible to shorten the time.

I've done it by creating my own asp page which calls the ActiveX viewer and closes the session when the page is closed. Since most people don't stare at a picture for 20 minutes this will shorten the time a license is in use.

Look at the Crystal support page for 'CE8_GETINSTANCE.EXE'
I've modified the getinstance.csp page to take input from a url instead of a form, but that part is easy to modify.

Njit

---
It's never too late to do the Right thing

 

[Infobiggot]

I believe you are running into a limit of CE 8.0 into the number of parameters that can be passed to a report.

This knowledge base article identifies the problem

http://support.crystaldecisions.com/library/kbase/articles/c2009665.asp

 

[Hattusas]

Do you have Web Component Server Installed on your server?In this module select web component server and in the following you can reduce the 20 minutes time out Salih Sipahi
Software Engineer.
City of Istanbul Turkey
openyourmind77@yahoo.com

 

[Finisher]

how can i know if WEB COMOPONENT SERVER is installed on the server machine? and what comprises WEB COMOPONENT SERVER?

 

[Finisher]

oppss i find it already, but where is the session property to configure the timeout?

 

[SteveRemington]

With regards to the changing of the default timeout setting for the CE 8.0 Web Component Server CD has a patch that you can apply that allows you to set the timeout. The patch filename is CE1489_8020.zip. You will have to contact CD support to get the details of the full FTP address.

It allows you to get better value for the 5 concurrent licences provided by CE 8.0 Std.

Regards,
Steve

 

[Finisher]

where can i find the patch CE1489_8020.zip can't find it... does anyone knows any URL where can i download?

 

[rhinok]

You have to call Crystal Decisions support to obtain the patch.

 

[njitter]

I find this policy of CD very annoying. This should be a publicly available patch. Sure, we can call Crystal to get it. But why not just put in on the internet.

Guess they don't want everyone to know the APS server can be patched...

Njit ---
It's never too late to do the Right thing

 

[jrq]

DId you ever get this fixed? I've got exactly the same thing, CD reported that no such patch existed, when I contacted them.

 

[SteveRemington]

This hot-fix (as CD calls them) MOST definitely exists. I know I have used it. Ring tech support and really push the point. The CE standard free licence is for 5 concurrent users. I don't recall any thing in the licence about these users having to have a 20 minute time-out. I believe the fixed 20 min time-out was a cynical money-grabbing exercise by the marketing department.

Also there is a bug in CE that causes authentication credentials in the cookies to be trashed if the record seletect string is too long. Refer to CD KB article at

http://support.crystaldecisions.com/library/kbase/articles/C2008615.asp

for details of a work around there is no patch as yet.

 

[rhinok]

[ol][li]The WCS (CE8_WCS.zip) patch allows you to set the timeout session, but it screws up your CMC - the APS patch (CE8_APS.zip) fixes the screw up, so request it at the same time.[/li][li]If you're concerned about sessions with limited licenses, definitely check out CE8_GETINSTANCE.EXE.[/li][li]Regarding 'too many parameters', you might be running into an issue identified in the following article (same as posted previously by IB)

http://support.crystaldecisions.com/library/kbase/articles/c2009665.asp

[/li][li]You've never actually posted an error message, could this actually be a page server/cache server timeout?[/li][/ol]

 

[SteveRemington]

I did some digging and found the URL for the WCS Time Out patch and here is it is:

ftp://ftp.crystaldecisions.com/outgoing/ehf/ce80wcs.zip

This file is actually a broad patch to the WCS and related components. It includes modified WCS files to allow the session time-out to be set.

Remeber this file is considered a "Hot-Fix" for CD and has the following disclaimer:

While this patch has not been through a full QA regression test cycle, it has been thoroughly sanity tested and has been deemed to fix the problems reported below, but may inadvertently introduce other unforeseen issues. If you have a development environment, please use it there before applying it into your production environment.

Below is the extract from the patch's readme.txt relating to being able to set the WCS session time out.

Escalation ID# 1,489
Track: CRWTRACK 55169

Description:
The session time-out for the Web Component Server is set to 20 minutes. You are unable to modify this setting.

New Behavior:
You can now modify the session time-out for the Web Component Server (WCS). You can do this via a command switch in the WCS in the Crystal Configuration Manager. The command switch is "-defaultSessionTimeout ##", where ## is the number of minutes for the desired session time-out.

The problem is fixed in the following component version and higher.

WebCompServer.exe 8.0.3.114 06/12/2001

Download it if you think you need it but remember to test it before loading it onto a production server.

 

[njitter]

Steve,

did you also find the APS patch (CE8_APS.zip)Rhinok mentioned??

I tried to find it on the Crystal Support site but no luck.

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It's never too late to do the Right thing

 

[lyanch]

I recently applied both CE80com.zip and CE80serv.zip and at least in combination they haven't caused any problems that I can see. They did correct the timeout problem. I think they rolled up a number of patches into these two, and corrected the problems discussed earlier.

Lisa