We had a strange issue at one of our customers. A user created a fairly big private view in Perspectives/Architect which never returns any data when executed in Slice/Arc (Arc 5.0.1). The view keeps spinning indefinitely but never shows any results. There was an active thread on the server, but it disappeared after about 1 minute. Although the view keeps spinning, Slice/Arc itself doesn’t hang; all actions still work and the spinning view can be closed or moved. Other - smaller - private views on the same cube work fine for the user.
I copied the user’s offending private view to my own private views folder and was able to open it without issue - it returned data after about 10 seconds. I then saved it as a public view which also worked for the user - again data in 10 seconds. And the view still worked after the user saved it as a private view.
Any idea what could explain this? As far as I know, the view file on disk just contains the definition of the view and should work the same for any user. And if it somehow got corrupted, I assume it would throw an error on opening or executing it. Or another user (me) opening a copy of that file should experience the same issues.
I think this may happen when a regular user opens a view that has dimensions on titles which return no elements due to security restrictions. If that’s the case, it should be resolved in Arc v5.2.
There’s no security defined for any of the title dimensions. Also, the user created the private view in Architect where it worked fine and a copy of the same view works fine in Arc as well. So, I don’t think security restrictions can explain the issue.
You can open the view files in notepad and see the definitions. It’s not pretty, but you may spot a difference between the one that works and the one that doesn’t.
The files are indeed different. The view file created in Architect just lists the name of each individual element on rows and columns, whereas after saving it in Arc the name in the file gets qualified by its dimension and hierarchy. I.e. “Elem” gets replaced by “[Dim].[Hier].[Elem]” (where Hier = Dim). I’d assume though, that the MDX query sent to the server would be the same for both versions, but maybe that’s not always the case.
Anyway, @aeremenko and @R.B thank you both for sharing your ideas on this!