Re: WebI XI 3.1 SP 3 View On Demand v.s. Scheduling

Hi,

Since you are on XI3.1 SP3, the problem that "try to refresh on demand a web intelligence report the refresh never finish, but if he tries to refresh document by scheduling it, the document is correctly finish and refresh" could be caused by the load balancing issue among the WIReportServer.  See ADAPT01536471

Description:

In Web Intelligence, an error message may appear when refreshing a Web Intelligence document when a load balancer is used in front of the Application Server.

New Behavior:

This problem is resolved.

Or, the LOV performance issue in WIReportServer.  See ADAPT01551854

Description:

LOVs are not displayed in cascading prompts when refreshing a Web Intelligence document in edit mode(Java Report panel), but lovs are displayed when refreshing the document in view mode (dHTML) in XI3.1 FP3.4 and higher versions.

New Behavior:

this problem is resolved.

Limitations:

After XI3.1 FP2.10, XI3.1 FP3.4 a caching mechanism has been implemented to improve prompt performance. If the LOV has already been loaded a first time, and it is still available in server cache, then this LOV is displayed. If the

LOV is not available in cache, it is not displayed, except in ther 2 situations where there is no default value defined or there is no previous values defined. In these 2 specific situations the LOV refresh is forced, and LOV is displayed in the prompt.

I'd suggest you to consider upgrade your XI3.1 SP3 to SP6 or above to accommodate the WIReportServer memory, load balancing, and LOV fixes.

In addition, the performance difference between XI3.1 Webi refresh on demand vs. scheduling is that scheduling does not generate the pre-caching XML file on the fly unless the user enable the pre-caching.

HTML Pre-Cache

HTML Pre-caching can be used to generate the XML files at schedule time instead of at view time of the instance.   This is particularly useful for complex reports including those that contain many report level variables that perform calculations on the data stored in the data cube of the WebI document.

Using HTML pre-caching in WebIntelligence does not actually generate HTML files, but XML files.  The XML files are converted into browser readable files (HTML, image files) when viewed.  The SDK does this XSL Transformation on the fly.

To enable HTML pre-caching from the CMC:

1. Login to the CMC.
2. Navigate to the report to be scheduled.
3. Click Properties > Schedule > Caching Options
4. Under “Select the Formats to Pre-Load the Cache with when Scheduling“ check “Standard HTML”
5. Next select the locale the cache files are to be created in.
6. Click the “Update” button.
7. Click back on the “Schedule” tab.
8. Click “Schedule” button.

To enable HTML pre-caching from Infoview:

1. Login to the Infoview.
2. Navigate to the Folder containing the report to be scheduled.
3. Click “Schedule” link below report name.
4. Expand the “Caching the Options” section.
5. Under “Select the Formats to Pre-Load the Cache with when Scheduling“ check “Standard HTML”
6. Next select the locale the cache files are to be created in.
7. Click “Schedule” button.

So are for the Excel Pre-Cache and PDF Pre-Cache.  Thus, if you schedule a webi report with pre-caching on, you'd see the scheduling completion time would increase, too.

Hope this helps,

Jin-Chong