Timeouts in SSRS 2005 Web Service and Report Viewer Control

One of the questions that I get asked a lot is how to prevent timeouts when running or exporting large reports using the SSRS web service or the .NET report viewer control.

With the report viewer control, this is fairly simple; the problem is that the property is hiding in the property tab. In the property tab, expand the ServerReport property, and set the timeout value to a large number or to -1 (infinite timeout)

For the web services, the ReportExecutionService instance contains the property Timeout.

In my previous post showing how to use the web service, I neglected to add the timeout property.

ReportExecutionService re = new ReportExecutionService();
re.Credentials = System.Net.CredentialCache.DefaultCredentials;
re.Timeout = -1;

Also, when working with the web service in SSRS 2005, you have to keep the IIS timeouts in mind. For example, the session timeout by default is 20 minutes. If you have reports taking longer than that, you would need to increase this setting in IIS. However, if your reports are taking that long, I would consider using SSIS to pre-process the report data on a schedule and then run the report against the pre processed data. That is a much more elegant solution.

peace