Working around Cloudflare 100 second timeout?

[DavidLee82]

Hi all,

This has been bothering me for ages. Occasionally we would have reports that takes ages (>2 minutes) to generate. On our local testing the report comes out okay after the long processing. However on sending to Production the report will more than often end up showing a Cloudflare 524 error instead of completing.

I am told that Cloudflare limits HTTP requests to 100 seconds. The reports takes 3-4 minutes to execute due to the sheer size of the dataset.

Does Stimulsoft have a method to work around the limit? For example, fire the job, close the connection and display a wait screen, then wait for the server to call back with a completed report?

[Lech Kulikowski]

Hello,

You can offload the generation of such heavy reports to the server side.
- Your own lightweight endpoint starts a background task: it loads the .mrt, sets the data sources/variables, and calls report.Render() - this happens outside the request thread, so nothing is left hanging behind Cloudflare while rendering is in progress.
- Once complete, report.SaveDocument() ьуерщв is called, or the report is exported - this saves the actual rendered result, not the template.
- The frontend polls a small status endpoint until the task status becomes "ready".
- When the result is ready, instead of loading the original report (which would trigger a full re-render), you pass the already rendered document to the viewer - report.LoadDocument(). Since it is already rendered, this call returns quickly - the open connection is no longer left hanging.

Thank you.

[DavidLee82]

Noted with thanks.

[Lech Kulikowski]

Hello,

You are welcome.

[DavidLee82]

Ok, so I'm starting to work on this. However I'm having one hiccup.

I am trying to pass my Variables over to the background thread. Due to how threads in EntityFramework works, I can't pass variables directly to the thread; to pass data to the thread I am reusing a flatfile format I devised for other purposes.

Here's the issue. I am now having trouble sending my variables over. I used the ToJson() method for StiVariablesCollection to serialize the data which seems to be working as intended. However I am unable to deserialize the data back to a useable object. I tried using JsonSerializer.Deserialize<StiVariablesCollection> the Collection itself looks okay but the content within the collection didn't deserialize as it should. I was told by AI about this StiJsonToObject method which will make things right, however that doesn't seem to exist? However AI seems adamant and consistent that StiJsonToObject is a thing so I'm really confused since hallucinations don't persist like that.

Edit: Nevermind. Worked out a solution. I have to use JsonConverter on both sides, not JsonSerializer. Once I have that sorted out everything's working.

[Lech Kulikowski]

Hello,

Thank you for the information.