Crystal Reports: The request could not be submitted for background processing

In Programming Tags #crystal-reports #aspnet-ajax Published 7/15/2011

So I got this error today when I user was generating a Crystal Report from a web page I maintain:

The request could not be submitted for background processing

Here is the problem with this error, it could be from hundreds of different problems. It basically means, something happened internally with Crystal when your report was being generated and it didn’t work. A little more detail would have been nice but I don’t expect much anymore from CR errors. I did figure out what the problem was in my case:

The symptoms/behavior:

  1. A report that usually runs without error started through the error message **“The request could not be submitted for background processing” **when generating a PDF file from the .Net Crystal Report objects.
  2. This report runs fine with the same criteria when run from Crystal Reports 10 (the full IDE) and Crystal Reports for Visual Studio 2008.
  3. This report fails to run with the above error message when generated from .Net code.

The issue/solution for my specific instance:

  1. The report in question has a photograph on it that’s read in from a database field. In this case, there was a JPEG file that was viewable in all photo editors I tried, worked in the CR editors but caused the report to fail when run from .Net code. I downloaded the JPEG from the database, opened it with Paint.Net, forced it to resave the file (very important that it actually resaved, if you have to, make a small change then save).I re-uploaded the file into the database and voilà, the report ran.

I suspect that the original JPEG was saved in a photo editor that attached extra metadata or saved the JPEG in a non-standard format (or one that causes CR headaches). I believe the problem image was saved with Adobe Photoshop. Paint.Net never fails me in cases like this, and sure enough, re-saving with it changed the format somehow. Just for a reference and for future searching, I’m going to include the StackTrace from .Net that was thrown when the report failed:

Error in File C:WINDOWSTEMPPEPL {336298EF-3DF9-4C00-A381-E2110B8A0B5F}.rpt: The request could not be submitted for background processing.
at CrystalDecisions.ReportAppServer.ConvertDotNetToErom.ThrowDotNetException(Exception e)
at CrystalDecisions.ReportSource.EromReportSourceBase.ExportToStream(ExportRequestContext reqContext)
at CrystalDecisions.CrystalReports.Engine.FormatEngine.ExportToStream(ExportRequestContext reqContext)
at CrystalDecisions.CrystalReports.Engine.ReportDocument.ExportToStream(ExportOptions options)
at CrystalDecisions.CrystalReports.Engine.ReportDocument.ExportToHttpResponse(ExportOptions options, HttpResponse response, Boolean asAttachment, String attachmentName)
at Iuf.Reporting.CrystalReport.GenerateCrystalReport(HttpResponse& response)
Error in File C:WINDOWSTEMPPEPL {336298EF-3DF9-4C00-A381-E2110B8A0B5F}.rpt: The request could not be submitted for background processing.
at CrystalDecisions.ReportAppServer.Controllers.ReportSourceClass.Export(ExportOptions pExportOptions, RequestContext pRequestContext)
at CrystalDecisions.ReportSource.EromReportSourceBase.ExportToStream(ExportRequestContext reqContext)