Cannot download dashboard to Excel

Question

I'm not able to export a dashboard to Excel as one of the portlets, a table, has too much data. The error message is "The request is too big to be handled. Cannot proceed”. Is there some limit which can be raised?

Answer

ResultMatrix should not be used as a report exporting tool for large volumes. Currently, it can handle a few thousand lines. For up to 50k rows we can still handle it if we increase the HTTP post limit (Jetty settings).

<jetty>
	<maxFormContentSize>200000</maxFormContentSize> //default value in bytes
</jetty>

To explain the background:

The whole data is sent to the browser when displaying the dashboard.
When exporting, the whole data is then sent in a different format to the server.
The server returns a proper Excel file.

maxFormContentSize is the maximum size of a client request and that size is expressed in bytes. The default is 200 KB, but often it is already set to 500 KB on new instances. We consider 5 MB to be quite a lot, but it also depends on whether all users have good hardware and Internet connection. How this translates in terms of rows depends a lot on the dashboard, number of columns, multiple grids, charts (e.g., Maps are quite heavy) etc.