When attempting to export a record list using the Export to Excel button, the download hangs without making progress. After 5 minutes, the download fails and throws a network-related error message.
On Chrome, for example, the following error will appear:
And on Edge:
In addition, the following error will be logged in tomcat-stdOut.log once the file has finished processing:
ERROR com.appiancorp.dataexport.DataExportStreamingOutput - Writing SmartServiceException to Excel Workbookcom.appiancorp.suiteapi.process.exceptions.SmartServiceException: An error occurred when attempting to write the document null. Please contact your system administrator for additional details.
The load balancers configured for Appian Cloud have a request timeout set to 5 minutes. However, for large datasets, Export to Excel can take longer than 5 minutes to process the file before downloading. When the Excel file is eventually generated, the process faces a broken pipe since the request to the load balancer has already timed out and thrown a "Network Error" message. As a result, the download fails.
This behavior can occur even if the dataset being exported has less than 100,000 rows for an entity-backed record, or less than 10,000 rows for a process-backed record.
A product use case to address this issue has been logged; #5951 - Need to make Export to Excel download as asynchronous functionality. To request addition to this use case, create a Support Case and provide the relevant information for steps 2 to 4 in KB-1717 - How to submit a product enhancement request.
Export the dataset in multiple smaller batches, such that each excel file download takes less than 5 minutes to process.
This article applies to all versions of Appian Cloud.
Last Reviewed: February 2024