CRM Online - rsProcessingError

Some day in the future I indeed to cover a more detailed post for CRM Online and diagnosing why you might get rsProcessingAborted or rsProcessingError messages on SSRS reports. It's a bit more involved than on premise due to the logging access limitations of CRM Online. In an on premise environment you can simply log on to your SSRS server and grab the log to get more detail. You don't get access to the same level of logging with CRM Online.

For now I will describe a very rudimentary/old school way to analyse a report I had deployed to CRM Online throwing the following error



Not much to go on, you get a retry and a close, unfortunately no download log. Searching around CRM gave no hints as to what was causing this.

What was my particular issue?

Firstly, you might be wondering what was the exact problem I ran into on my report. It was an issue with images which we have attached to an entity. We use this to download and display images on the report. The SSRS report was set up to render a JPEG, but somebody uploaded a BMP file. This was oddly working fine from within Visual Studio, but in the Report Viewer it did not like it. I would have liked the image to not render instead of throwing an error like the above. But how did I discover the problem?

Step 1 - It works on my machine!

I started with the old developer trick to see if it ran on my machine. Open up Visual Studio and run the report for the same report/record combination. You can do this by modifying the parameter called CRM_Filterednew_entity where obviously "new_entity" refers to the entity you run the report against. This parameter is simply some fetch xml that you can build using an advanced find to filter to the record in question.

Once you have performed the above, does the report run? If not you should get an error a bit more substantial than what the Report View was displaying.

If the report does indeed run, check instead for warnings. These can often surface as a processing error in Report Viewer. Nuke all of your warnings where possible!

None of the above worked for me.

Step 2 - Trim the hedges

It's working within visual studio. So what can you do? Create a copy of the report and start trimming pieces off it to find the root cause. Start with more likely parts, for example:

Remove a complex table. Deploy the report. Does it run?
Remove some complex expressions. Deploy the report. Does it run?
Remove sorts. Deploy the report. Does it run?
Remove show/hide expressions etc. Does it run?
Remove images. Does it run?
...

This is where I stopped as it highlighted my issue, but you see where I'm going with this. Keep stripping bits and pieces until you hit what's making the report fail. You can undertake this process of elimination in quite a binary fashion as well to speed up the process. For example, remove half of the report, does the error go away? Remove the other half, does the error go away? Drill into the half with the error and repeat the process.