Hello,

We're looking to do a native installation of JSReport using docker. However, we ran into several issues because phantom-pdf has been deprecated. We attempted several solutions, including getting an older version of your docker container that supported phantom-pdf, but it's still not quite right.

Is it possible to get a copy of the docker container used for your cloud jsreportonline instance since that appears to be working correctly?

@jan_blaha Understood, that's disappointing. We're going to have to install our own jsreport instance then. I've avoided that option mainly because I'm concerned of the time it will take for my team to get it installed and setup correctly in our AWS EC2 environment. I see you offer support plans. As part of that, would your team be available to do the installation for us for a cost? Once it's up and running, we would take it from there. I'm just looking to fast track the installation and configuration process. Either that, or if you could provide the configuration settings / installation recipes / etc.. that mirror the online environment. In reality, it's not the creation of the server or installation of the software that concerns me... it's setting it up / configuring it so behaves like your SaaS version does. Please advise.

Hello again. To add to my previous comment, in your API documentation (https://jsreport.net/learn/api), there is a section about Timeout. Does this option exist in the SaaS version? It appears that there is a global value defined that can then be overwritten for a given request. If that's the case, this would work for us. The majority of our reports render just fine within the global timeout. However, there is a payroll reconciliation report that our clients use that has steadily been growing in size week by week (which is a good thing for us). If we had the ability to increase the timeout for this report, that would suffice.

As a whole, your SaaS service has been great, with this one exception. Not being able to render a report due to a timeout is causing issues for our clients.

:: Thanks

Hello. Has there been any movement on the timeout configuration option? I'm getting the following timeout error for a report whose data is steadily growing for our client each week:

Timeout
Error: Timeout at /app/node_modules/phantom-workers/lib/phantomManager.js:116:29 at /app/node_modules/phantom-workers/lib/phantomWorker.js:103:24 at /app/node_modules/phantom-workers/lib/phantomWorker.js:124:20 at Socket. (/app/node_modules/phantom-workers/lib/checkPortStatus.js:45:9) at Socket.emit (events.js:311:20) at TCP. (net.js:668:12)

+0 Starting rendering request 90298 (user: undefined)
+6 Rendering template { name: tm_PayrollReconcileV1, recipe: phantom-pdf, engine: handlebars, preview: false }
+9 Inline data specified.
+9 Resources not defined for this template.
+15 Replaced assets ["tm_PayrollReconcileV1.css"]
+15 Rendering engine handlebars using dedicated-process strategy
+709 Compiled template not found in the cache, compiling
+3451 Executing recipe phantom-pdf
+4101 Starting child request to render pdf header
+5441 Starting rendering request 90300 (user: undefined)
+5450 Rendering anonymous template { recipe: html, engine: handlebars }
+5453 Inline data specified.
+5454 Resources not defined for this template.
+5478 Replaced assets ["tm_PayrollReconcileV1.css"]
+5483 Rendering engine handlebars using dedicated-process strategy
+6301 Compiled template not found in the cache, compiling
+6541 Executing recipe html
+6542 Skipping storing report.
+6544 Rendering request 90300 finished in 1103 ms
+7195 Starting child request to render pdf footer
+8417 Starting rendering request 90303 (user: undefined)
+8429 Rendering anonymous template { recipe: html, engine: handlebars }
+8431 Inline data specified.
+8431 Resources not defined for this template.
+8438 Rendering engine handlebars using dedicated-process strategy
+8893 Compiled template not found in the cache, compiling
+8975 Executing recipe html
+8976 Skipping storing report.
+8977 Rendering request 90303 finished in 560 ms

Sorry, let me clarify. Let's forget about Lambda for now. Basically, when I make the request to jsreportonline for the report in question, because of the amount of data, jsreportonline fails with one of the above errors. The failure happens at the following line:

const res = await jsReportClient.render(

The threshold seems to be somewhere around 30 seconds. For the given report, if the data included in the .render() statement causes jsreportonline to process for around 30sec or more, the request fails and .render() throws one of the errors above. If the data included causes jsreportonline to process for under 30 seconds, the SAME report renders without any issues.

Bottom line, long running requests into .render() (30 sec or more) seem to fail with one of the above two errors. I assumed it was a timeout issue with .render() and that therefore, adding {timeout:180000} into the call would have fixed it. However, that doesn't seem to have done anything.

I've been using lambda to make requests into jsreportonline by using client.render() without any issues for some time now. I will continue to use lambda to make calls to jsreportonline. However, it wasn't until recently, when one of my clients had a lot of data for this particular report that this issue arose.

Note, I've also tested this by running the same client.render() request, with the same large data set & report, through a cloud9 AWS nodejs app and received the same error. So it doesn't appear to be relevant to lambda.

One of my reports has a lot of data and it therefore may take 30 sec or more to process in jsreportonline. Because of that, I've moved the report rendering to a worker process in AWS Lambda that, when complete, saves the report into my S3 bucket. Here is my code:

    try {

        // Code to get report data goes here .....
        // let reportData = ....
        
        // Call JSReport Engine, which returns a promise
        const res = await jsReportClient.render(
                {
                    template: { "shortid": jsReportShortId},
                    data: reportData,
                    options: { reports: { save: false } }
                }, 
                { 
                    timeout: 180000 
                });
        
        // Save PDF report
        renderedPDF = await res.body();
        
        // Code to save to S3 goes here .....

    }
    catch (err) {
        
        // Show error
        console.log("Error getting report from JSReport Online API endpoint");
        console.log(err);

        // Otherwise, just close out callback
        callback(null, 'Error Callback');
    }

For the report in question, sometimes this works without any issue. However, other times I get the following error:

2020-01-20 06:01:41.033 Error: connect ECONNREFUSED 127.0.0.1:16784
    at /var/task/processJSReport/node_modules/jsreport-client/lib/client.js:62:29
    at /var/task/processJSReport/node_modules/jsreport-client/lib/client.js:115:40
    at ConcatStream.<anonymous> (/var/task/processJSReport/node_modules/concat-stream/index.js:36:43)
    at ConcatStream.emit (events.js:215:7)
    at ConcatStream.emit (domain.js:476:20)
    at finishMaybe (/var/task/processJSReport/node_modules/readable-stream/lib/_stream_writable.js:630:14)
    at afterWrite (/var/task/processJSReport/node_modules/readable-stream/lib/_stream_writable.js:492:3)
    at processTicksAndRejections (internal/process/task_queues.js:82:21) {
  remoteStack: 'Error: connect ECONNREFUSED 127.0.0.1:16784\n' +
    '    at TCPConnectWrap.afterConnect [as oncomplete] (net.js:1191:14)'
}

I've also received the following error:

2020-01-20 06:26:21.052 Error: socket hang up
    at /var/task/processJSReport/node_modules/jsreport-client/lib/client.js:62:29
    at /var/task/processJSReport/node_modules/jsreport-client/lib/client.js:115:40
    at ConcatStream.<anonymous> (/var/task/processJSReport/node_modules/concat-stream/index.js:36:43)
    at ConcatStream.emit (events.js:215:7)
    at ConcatStream.emit (domain.js:476:20)
    at finishMaybe (/var/task/processJSReport/node_modules/readable-stream/lib/_stream_writable.js:630:14)
    at afterWrite (/var/task/processJSReport/node_modules/readable-stream/lib/_stream_writable.js:492:3)
    at processTicksAndRejections (internal/process/task_queues.js:82:21) {
  remoteStack: 'Error: socket hang up\n' +
    '    at createHangUpError (_http_client.js:342:15)\n' +
    '    at Socket.socketOnEnd (_http_client.js:437:23)\n' +
    '    at emitNone (events.js:111:20)\n' +
    '    at Socket.emit (events.js:208:7)\n' +
    '    at endReadableNT (_stream_readable.js:1064:12)\n' +
    '    at _combinedTickCallback (internal/process/next_tick.js:139:11)\n' +
    '    at process._tickCallback (internal/process/next_tick.js:181:9)'
}

Is there something that I must do to ensure that the report runs successfully each time?

Understood. I agree regarding your previous statement. The "render" method is not blocking the app given the "promise" implementation. However, it's still an issue for us.

We use heroku to deploy our application. Unfortunately, heroku implements a hard 30sec request timeout. This means that any request by our client to render a report from jsreports must complete in 30sec or less. If it does NOT, then the heroku web server terminates the request and returns an error to the client. We have some reports that are getting close to reaching that limit and we'd like to implement some sort of polling architecture before it becomes an issue.

Jan,

Finally got to working on this again. Took your advice and we're now looking to create a polling mechanism.

The nodejs then calls this location but also include the basic auth header.

However, we're having trouble actually polling the jsreportsonline server. Below is the endpoint we created on our NodeJS server. It accepts the report status URL (in the form of http://jsreport-host/reports/id/status) as a parameter and then attempts to poll that URL. I'm using the request-promise library. I've attempted using both GET and POST methods. When using GET, the response is the html for your login page. When using POST, I get an error message of

StatusCodeError: 302 - "Found. Redirecting to http://jsreportonline.net/sign"

Here is the code for my endpoint:

    // Get modules
    const thisRouter = require('express').Router();
    const rp = require('request-promise');

====================================== ROUTE
    thisRouter.route('/common/jsreports/poll')
        
        // ====================== POST
        .post(function(req,res,next){
            
            // Get report params
            let reportStatus = req.body.reportStatus;
            
            // Get status
            return rp({
                    method: 'POST',
                    uri: reportStatus,
                    auth: {
                        'user': process.env.JSREPORT_USR,
                        'pass': process.env.JSREPORT_PWD
                    },
                    body: '',
                    json: false
                    
                })
                .then(function(response){
                    
                    console.log(response);
                    
                    // return nothing for now
                    res.json({});
                })
                .catch(function(e){
                    console.log(e);
                    res.status(500).send(e);
                });
            
        });
          

Can you provide some guidance on how to check the status?

Thanks Jan. Here's what the code looked like before:

client.render(
   {
      "template":{"shortid": myShortId},
      "data": mydata,
      "options": {"reports": {"save": false}}
   })
   .then((response) => response.pipe(res));

However, as per your documentation about Async, which read:

... but the rendering is still synchronous and you receive response back after the process is finished.

We found that response.pipe() code would execute only after the report completed processing. If the report took several seconds to process given our large data, then this impacted our nodejs express app by blocking the event loop until the report completed. Other requests to express would then get impacted, et... Therefore, we were looking to run it asynchronously, store the report somewhere and then serve the report once it completed processing. Initially, we were thinking of using AWS S3 as the store, but since jsreportsonline provides temporary storage, we opted to go with that approach.

Your suggestion works and we will try sending the request from the nodejs server. If I have questions on that, I'll reply to this forum.

I use jsreportonline. I recently changed my report rendering to both save reports and run them asynchronously. This was because the synchronous approach is blocking my express app:

client.render(
   {
      "template":{"shortid": myShortId},
      "data": mydata,
      "options": {"reports": {"save": true, "async": true }}
   })
   .then(function(response){
       // Set status URL
       res.json({"location": response.headers.location});  
   });

The goal was to return the location status URL to the client's browser so that the client could poll the status URL until the report had completed rendering and then download the report. Note my web client uses Angular 1.x

$http.get(response.location,{"responseType":'document'})
     .then(
         // Success
        function(result){
                                
           // Check status of report....
           // If complete, download report.  Otherwise, poll again ....
        });

In this example, response.location would read something like https://myapp.jsreportonline.net/reports/id/status

However, I ran into a problem when the client's browser attempted to check the status by getting the location URL. Because the browser does not have the credentials to my jsreportonline instance, the status check failed with the following error:

Mixed Content: The page at 'https://myapp.com/reportpage' was loaded over HTTPS, but requested an insecure XMLHttpRequest endpoint 'http://jsreportonline.net/sign'. This request has been blocked; the content must be served over HTTPS.

So, what's the best way to have my client app poll the status of the save report and then download the final report? Should I be polling the status through my NodeJS app by using the jsreport-client package?