Error exporting to PDF

[intapiuser]

Sisense allows you to generate a PDF report of your dashboard when you need to take copies of your dashboards with you for meetings or sharing them with others.

This article gives detailed  troubleshooting steps on how to handle PDF export failures on all Sisense versions.

How Does It Work?

When you click Download PDF or the PDF icon in the menu bar

, a preview of your report is opened.

After you have defined the appearance of your report, you can save the layout of the dashboard by clicking Save.

The next step is to click Download PDF, your saved layout will be downloaded into a PDF file.

Disable All Plugins

One of the most common causes of a PDF export failure is due to a faulty plugin. If you cannot export any report to PDF, then the issue is most likely due to plugins.

Firstly, disable all the plugins. To do so, go to Admin → Plugins under System Configuration and toggle the switch to disable each plug-in.

To disable all plugins at once, select each Plug-in and toggle the Disable Selected switch:

If the report is exported to PDF successfully, then you can switch on the plug-ins one-by-one to find the problematic one. When you find a problematic plug-in, make sure you have the latest version of the plug-in installed.

If disabling all plugins does not work we recommend going to the actual "plugins" folder on the Sisense server and removing all the plugin folders manually.

For versions 7.2 and higher the "plugins" folder can be found in

C:\Program Files\Sisense\app\plugins

For versions 7.1 and lower the "plugins" folder can be found in

C:\Program Files\Sisense\PrismWeb\plugins

Disable All Scripts

An easy way to determine where the issue is, is to create a new simple widget and try to export it. If the dashboard is exported successfully, it means that the issue is local, and you need to check the scripts applied to your widgets and dashboards.

Try to disable your scripts to understand if it affects your PDF exports. Once you find the broken script, you will need to fix it.

To disable a script, you need to open the Script Editor and disable your script by commenting it out. It can be commented out by adding ‘//’ to the beginning of each row.

• For dashboard scripts, for the dashboard, in your dashboard, click Edit Script

• For a specific widget, click on the widget in Edit mode.

7.2 And Later Further Troubleshooting

If you are using Sisense installation which is on V7.2 and above and still experiencing errors with PDF exports, it is possible that it is related to a Configuration Manager setting.

To troubleshoot this, on a Sisense webserver take the following steps:
(please note that this could make your site unavailable for a short period of time so take care to do this off-hours if in a production environment)

1. In a web browser (Chrome is preferred but any of the supported web browsers are OK), navigate to http://localhost:3030
2. You will see the Configuration Manager appear
3. Scroll down to the "Domain Binding" section.
   If this field is populated, remove the entry. There are only a few specific reasons to have this set. If your Sisense domain is attached to the server via a DNS entry you typically do not need to set this.
4. Click the 'Save' button at the top right-hand corner

7.1 And Earlier Further Troubleshooting

If you are using Sisense installation which is below V7.2 and still experiencing errors with PDF exports, it is possible that it is related to a local configuration file issue. 

To verify the configuration is correct, please follow the below:

1. If you have an domain defined on your server, make sure the setting in 'Admin'-->'system configuration' does not include "http://"
2. Make sure that you have access to the domain URL from the local server (ie. http://bi.my.company.com/)
3. If you have SSL configured  - please make sure you can browse to the secure site locally as well  (ie. https://bi.my.company.com/)
4. Check bindings:
   1. Open the Windows IIS Manager -> Navigate to each of the websites -> "Bindings" and make sure that no two websites bind to same port (double bindings)
   2. Go to "Add or Remove Programs" -> Right click on Sisense and choose "Change..." -> In installation window "Continue" -> "Change Settings" and verify that the port configured matches the port specified in the IIS Manager for Sisense Web

If these troubleshooting steps do not fix the issue, you may need to edit the exporting section of the default.yaml file.

1. Find the file here: C:\Program Files\Sisense\PrismWeb\vnext\config
2. The exporting section is located at the end of the file, and there are 3 variables you may have to change- host, port, and protocol.
3. Please set these variables to the values that are used to access Sisense Web on the server. For example, if you access Sisense Web by going to http://test.dashboards.com, you would set the variables tohost: "test.dashboards.com"
   port: 80
   protocol: "http"
4. After making the changes, save the file, and restart IIS.

Log Files

For further investigation detailed logs on the any PDF related errors can be found below

For Sisense V7.1.3 and earlier:

C:\Program Files\Sisense\PrismWeb\vnext\iisnode

For Sisense V7.2 and later:

C:\ProgramData\Sisense\application-logs

If you are still seeing issues after following this guide please feel free to contact Sisense Support for further assistance