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Lewis_Beard's avatar
Lewis_Beard
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21 days ago

Reports UIv4 are difficult to use

I will just say my most scathing summary up top, then I will drill into an example: I do not believe Reports UIv4 should even be in production. It is that problematic.

  • I wanted to make an ad hoc Interface Bandwidth report for the last 30 days
  • After laying out my params, I clicked SAVE.
  • LM proceeded to run the report, even though I ONLY HIT SAVE
  • It was a lot of data, so I had to wait 5-10 minutes even though I DID NOT RUN IT
  • LM didn't send any CSV to me anywhere, nothing happened.
  • I was still on the edit form with SAVE and SAVE and RUN greyed out
  • I tried to leave the page, it wanted me to click continue to quit.
  • I did so, and my report wasn't saved!!!!!!
  • I repeated ALL of the above but did SAVE and RUN.
  • I had to wait 10 mins again, nothing happened. No explanations.
  • I closed the browser fully, came back and my report HAD been saved.
  • I clicked on MANAGE and LM tried to RUN the whole report before letting me manage it.
  • I closed my browser because I didn't want to wait 10 minutes.
  • I went back to the reports page, clicked PLAY and it told me it was running already and asked for email
  • About 30 minutes later it was never sent.
  • But in the mean time, I repeated ALL of the above under a new report LM didn't think was still running. Because I didnt want to wait for it to run for 10 mins just to manage it.
  • I experienced ALL of the above again.
  • At some point, I clicked manage to change it to a scheduled report, it tried to PLAY it to show results before presenting manage. I wanted 10 minutes and FINALLY got to the manage page
  • I switched it to scheduled. I clicked SAVE. I forgot that my changes sometimes aren't saved unless I do the other option.
  • Somehow I got back to that state where I couldn't leave the page without losing my changes EVEN THOUGH I had clicked SAVE because it thinks I have pending changes, but SAVE and SAVE and RUN are greyed out.

Here is the final state. I'll just stop there.

How is the Reports section even usable in UIv4. I never under any circumstances want a report to play when I'm just looking at it, managing it, or even when browsing to it in the report list. Its terrible when debugging a report that is being painful for LM-limitation reasons.

I get similar complaints from users on this or other problems. The only person in our org who likes UIv4 doesnt ever use the product, he just looks at it occasionally.

The whole reports UIv4 needs to go back to formula.

2 Replies

  • I believe the fix for you large report would be to schedule it for the future. If a report is to large, it just won't properly run. In the old UI it would prompt you for an email and then background it. Unless something changed recently to fix it, that wasn't hasn't been the case since the new UI.

    • Lewis_Beard's avatar
      Lewis_Beard
      Icon for Professor rankProfessor

      I stopped there at the end, but I did go on to make it scheduled for the future. It never completed running and never delivered anything to me in email. But my email isnt blocked. I get other regular reports that are smaller that were set up previously that I get on the regular.

      So scheduling it for a couple hours in the future and waiting produced no results. I suspect the amount of data was too much. Several times when I tried to run it adhoc and DID get it to try to do something (after the above) I got the error message that there were too many interfaces, 3600 vs some limit of 2900 or whatever it was. So I scheduled one on a subset (I have some sub folders) and still the data must have choked the back-end.

      The only thing I think I can try now is to make 26 reports, one for each letter of the alphabet in my subfolders, or at least make a few, schedule those in advance, and see if I can even get anything at all.

      A year or so ago, before the changes to the reporting back-end and the enforcement of UIv4, I would have had this done in 5 minutes. Now I've spend 3 hours trying to coax the system into giving me the same data. Lots of the old reports people used had to be abandoned or completely reworked into broken fragments back when they made some back-end changes to whatever handles the request.

      Anyway, appreciate the suggestion. I should have clarified that it was one of the things I tried.