PowerDesigner 16 - List Report - Table-Column level Exporting to Excel format

[navinladda]

I have a pretty simple List report that takes upwards of 10 mins to get saved as an Excel file. This is a local PDM file.

All I have is Table.Code, Column.Code, DataType, Length, Mandatory, Primary Key, Foreign Key, Is Key, Comment, Position In Parent Collection.

Model itself has maybe 50 tables and in the List report filter, I have about 15 tables.

Everytime I have to generate this report, PD will show the circle indicating it is processing and I then cannot do anything till it finishes.

I have to then open up another instance of PD and make sure the models I need to work on is not the same model and not open in the first instance of PD. This also un-necessarily consumes up another license from our Enterprise License Pool.

[GeorgeMcGeachie]

I tried this myself with a much larger List Report (there are 852 table columns in the output), and it also took 10 minutes. Looking at the Task manager while it was running, the problem appeared to be the amount of CPU being used by Excel - it was maxing out one core).

As an alternative I wrote a simple script that generates the List report to a file in 5 different formats (XML, TAB, CSV, HTML, RTF) - it took 3 seconds to generate all 5 of them.

In the script, use the GenerateFile method on the List Report. For example:

listRep.GenerateFile fileName, fileFormat

I've written scripts to export to Excel, and then run much faster than the PowerDesigner Excel export, so I would report this to SAP as a bug - it's working, but not efficiently enough.

[Ondrej_Divis]

Hi George, having completely different results using GUI and API is quite interesting. I did similar test, exporting a list report with 1000 columns from 50 tables and the export to CSV (using GUI) and exporting and opening in Excel took 1 second. And this is the time period I expected. Exporting (only) hundreds of columns from PD definitely should not take minutes. I still think this is not (just) PD problem. I tested it on 16.6 SP09 64-bit and MS Office 365. What are your versions? Can you try it on different version / different PC? Nevertheless I admit, that using Ctrl+C/Ctrl+V might be the fastest way to get rid of those 10 minutes.

[GeorgeMcGeachie]

ondrej_divis I'm using PD 16.7 PL02 (6396) 64-bit, Office 365 version 18.2005.1191.0 (up to date as far as I can tell).

I've generated the same List Report from the same model on a different PC, and it took 8 minutes

[GeorgeMcGeachie]

Just tried it on a PC with very little software on it - it has the same version of PD, and I had to install Office 365 - it took 1.25 minutes to generate the Excel file. Perhaps the issue is with Excel, and the solution is to remove and reinstall Office? Not a nice answer if you've got an imaged PC.

[Ondrej_Divis]

It`d be great to have a comment form anyone responsible from SAP about this issue. Obviously it is not a bug on one single PC.

[GeorgeMcGeachie]

Instead of generating an Excel file, copy and paste into an existing Excel file instead. You don't get the formatting but it's much quicker.

You can select everything by clicking on the top-left tile in the output, just above where you see the first row number. CTRL/C to copy the content, then CTRL/V to paste into Excel.

[navinladda]

Let me try this. As we speak, just before I came back to view this thread, I had already hit the export option and now it is thinking and my PD instance is stuck. As soon as it comes back to life, I am going to try this, will save me lot of time.

[Ondrej_Divis]

Hi Navin, this is obviously too long. Does it happen only with this particular model? Then it is probably caused by something in the model. Does it happen even when you create fresh new dummy model with 50 tables and generate the list report there? Then it might be caused by something on your computer PD installation, Excel installation or whatever else. Can you export your model on different computer? Does it behave the same? Answers to these questions can move you forward to the solution of this problem.

Ondrej

[navinladda]

It happens with all models. It happens not just on my computer, but on others in my team as well.

I don't have the option to create a fresh new dummy model with 50 tables well attributed to test. We have a single model from which I have been cherry picking what I need for next task assignment(to re-use), add new objects and then generate the report. Sometimes a new model is created by saving as the previous model, so whatever is in that model that is causing this export to excel delay is being carried around. But without knowing what it is hard. And since it is happening with others, it is nothing wrong with my installation. I have a brand new imaged machine that is just 2 months old.