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Bulk PDF Generation [thousands of unique customer statements every month]

procedemis
Explorer
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Has anybody figured out how to quickly/efficiently generate thousands of unique 'customer statements' every month [or something similar] using some sort of scalable method [besides looping on a single machine or two] - like an Azure Web Service that can scale up with demand?

Generating PDFs 'serially' takes forever and uses a lot of resources.  We use the exact same RPT file, but have to programmatically run it once for each customer in our database [changing the customer id in the parameter].  Is there a better way, I mean doing the looping works but pegs the CPU and takes forever.

 I would want to do it in Azure, but I don't think the Crystal dlls can be referenced from an Azure web service, can it?  Can referencing the runtime dlls and adding them to the bin folder of the web service - on a machine where the runtime installer has not been run, work?  Has anybody done that?  It would let me load balance and scale it up.

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ido_millet
Active Contributor

There are several 3rd-party tools that can handle single-pass report bursting. But since you are focused on speed, here are two candidates that start with exporting a report with all statements to a single pdf. Then, the PDF gets split into individual, dynamically named, statements.  You can optionally email the split pdf files to dynamic destinations with dynamic messages. 

PDF-eXPLODE: see info here

Visual CUT: see video demo of the splitting process. 
disclosure: I'm the developer of Visual CUT.

procedemis
Explorer
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ok thank you, I will check them out... so basically it seems that is the 'strat' - to generate the giant all-in-one PDF and split it up....