Why is Crystal unable to display any data for my topic?

At the end of a very articulated process of topic creation and configuration, you’ve eventually arrived at the most exciting part of your experience: the interaction with your advisor!

But when you ask crystal about your topic, something unexpected happens and the advisor tells you that there is no data available.

First of all, remember that if you don't include the time range in the question (for example, if you ask crystal to show the sales overview without specifying any period of time), the advisor will use the default time range that was set up in the configuration.

So, if the time range has not been specified while asking the question and the advisor is not showing you any data, you should check in the topic configuration what the default time range is.

Otherwise, if you mentioned in your question a specific time range different from the default one, it might be worth trying to ask the question referring to a different time range.

But if this is not your case, don’t let frustration take over and let’s see together how to solve your problem, starting from the possible causes!

Technical issue

The reason for this malfunction might simply be a technical issue, due to a crystal update, a network problem or something similar.

To make sure this is not your case, we recommend to wait a few minutes and then try again to retrieve the information needed. If the problem persists, you can try to check the filter configuration before contacting our Support Team by clicking on the icon in the lower left corner.

Filter configuration issue

In the event that crystal informs the users that there isn’t any available data in response to their question, it’s very important to check that the filters have been configured correctly.

In particular, a common misconfiguration issue is on the time filter.

Issues with the time filter generally occur when:

  1. The data source is static, meaning that data isn’t updated periodically, such as daily, weekly, etc: in this case you need to connect a new data source and re-create your topics.

  2. A new year has begun, and therefore the data does not include any information for the new year: in this case you also need a new data source which is updated in real time with new year information.

  3. The time filter applied restricts the topic from seeing data for the previous years: in this case you need to change the question and/or change the default time filter, if you realize the error is related to it.

One of these points might be contributing to the issue (a combination of two or three of them is less likely but still possible).

Go to the Self-Service Console and temporarily unpublish the topic affected by this problem. The unpublishing process can take 5 to 10 minutes to complete, so do not be alarmed if the topic remains in the unpublishing status for a short while.

Then go to the filter configuration step and update the time filter for this topic, so that its range includes data from within the database crystal is connected to.

Once you have updated the time filter to something different (e.g. last year), you will need to publish the topic again and, once it has been published again, you can return to the advisor and ask the same question. If the issue was actually related to the time filter restricting the data, you will now be able to view a whole host of data.

However, if despite these changes you should still be unable to see the data for this topic, contact us: we will be happy to help you with this issue!

Last updated