For the last few days, I’ve been trying to figure out one mysterious aspect of “Export to File for Paginated Reports” action, which is that it was always taking just a little more than 30 seconds to complete.
Which, even for the simplest static paginated report that would not even connect to a data source, would always result in the flow duration which is just over 30 seconds as well:
There was a support ticket, yet I kept asking around, and, eventually, it was confirmed that this is just how it works because of some internal details, so we should expect 30+ seconds there.
Which is an interesting caveat, since once of the scenarios I was trying to implement is printing invoice documents from a model-driven app. That would include a flow, which would be triggered from a ribbon button using Javascript, and, as a result, generated invoice would be downloaded so the user would print it.
Would it be reasonable to ask the users to wait for about 40-50 seconds just to get the invoice generated when it’s part of the process where the end client is waiting for that invoice? It’s a good question, and I don’t, yet, know, what the answer would be, so may actually have to fall back to the word templates in this particular scenario.
There are other scenarios, though, where 30 seconds wait time would not make any difference (that’s when it takes longer to generate the report anyways, or when the process is a-synchronous by nature. As in, when the report is supposed to be sent by email/stored in Sharepoint, for example).
Anyways, at least now I know what’s happening, so I can stop thinking I’m losing my mind
PS. There is ItAintBoring PowerPlatform chat session coming up on Oct 12 where we’ll talk about Power BI paginated reports in particular, but, also, we will, hopefully, have a broader discussion about document/report generation in Power Apps. If you have something to share, or if you just wanted to listen in, don’t forget to register for the event: https://www.linkedin.com/events/oct12itaintboringpowerplatformc6843586222267478016/
Maybe you send the report as an attachment via Power Automate once it is ready for download?! Not sure if doable but something to explore.
That’s the alternative, and we have some flows running in the background which are fine in that sense. It’s the “interactive” part that suffers (where we have a ribbon button and a flow that runs when the button is clicked), since forcing the users to wait for over a minute to get a simple report might be a bit too much