CRM Organization Import Issue and SSRS MaxRequestLength

While importing an organization to CRM 2011 I came across an error during the import wizard process which was causing the import to fail:

14:54:33|   Info| PublishReportsFromDatabase: Creating report in Reporting Services.  ReportId: 9f973403-bc84-e111-88bc-0050569e0001, Name: INVOICE PAYMENTS
14:54:34|  Error| Error while updating organization information: System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.
   at Microsoft.Crm.Reporting.RuntimeReportServer.UploadReport(String path, Byte[] reportDefinition, String name, String description, Boolean overwriteExistingReport)
   at Microsoft.Crm.Reporting.RuntimeReportServer.UploadReport(SRSReport report, String reportNameOnSrs, String name, String description, Boolean isSharedReport, Boolean overwriteExistingReport)
   at Microsoft.Crm.Setup.Server.Utility.ReportsUtility.OrganizationPublishReportsScaleGroup(IDbCommand command, Uri reportingUrl, String orgUniqueName, Boolean ignoreCustomReportsFailure, Boolean publishOnlyCustomReports)
   at Microsoft.Crm.Tools.Admin.DBImportHelper.RePublishReports(IDbCommand command, Guid organizationId, String organizationUniqueName, Uri reportUrl)
   at Microsoft.Crm.Tools.Admin.ImportOrganizationInstaller.UpdateOrganizationInfo(Guid organizationId, OrganizationGroupsInfo organizationInfo, String organizationFriendlyName, String organizationUniqueName, Uri reportServerUrl, Int32 PercentUpdateOrganization, ICollection`1 users)

This was not an upgrade of any sort - just simply a CRM migration to a new environment so there were no versioning differences from a CRM perspective. While the error above is lacking much detail, it did give us enough to begin troubleshooting. I could clearly see that this issue was occurring with a report titled “Invoice Payments” but knew nothing else. At this point, I enlisted the help of a colleague (The amazing Lauren Hudgins) who is more familiar with report writing to see if there was anything peculiar about this report. After obtaining a copy of the report’s RDL file, we weren't able to notice anything wrong in particular with the way the report was written but did think it was rather large for an RDL file – nearly 5MB – there were quite a few embedded images.

We decided to attempt uploading the report directly into SSRS and were met with a much more helpful error message - “Maximum request length exceeded”. What this was telling us rang a bell with what we noticed earlier regarding the RDL file size. By default, SSRS has a limit on the report file size that it will allow to be imported. This limit is 4MB but can be increased by doing the following:

Open the web.config of the Report Manager (%\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.X\Reporting Services\ReportManager) and find the “executionTimeout” setting. It should look something like this:
  <executionTimeout = “9000” /> 

On this line, add the maxRequestLength attribute with the value (in KB) needed to upload the report. This value is not in here by default. It should now look like this (this shows a 10MB limit):
       <executionTimeout = “9000” maxRequestLength=”10240″ />

Save the file and then repeat these steps in the web.config of the Report Server (%\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.X\Reporting Services\ReportServer). Once both files have been modified and saved, restart the SSRS service.

Following this change, we were able to upload the RDL to SSRS directly to verify that the change worked and then subsequently were able to complete the organization import for CRM without issue. Big thanks to Lauren for her assistance on this one.