Question

Technical question with Forms and Data sources

Forms Version 10

Updated May 12, 2021

asked on May 6, 2021 • Show version history

Asking for understanding on the data source connection process for Laserfiche Forms.

So, Context:

At my company we have LF Rio 10.4 (latest update as of March 2020), We have 2 Forms servers one front end and the other back end. The data sources are set to connect to an older SQL server version 13.0.5. The connection is egregiously slow, so much so that one database on that same box can't be communicated with at all, refresh the data sources just fails after a timeout.

Since connecting using SQL Management Studio v17 was the same, egregiously slow on the databases in question, we thought it was a problem with the SQL Server, until one of the developers for that server showed us that pulling back 130,000+ rows within the blink of an eye was normal for that machine.

So I got to looking at SQL Management Studio on my machine, and after some digging I had to disable "Check for server certificate revocation", and now I can do the same thing. Queries don't take 3 minutes to run with no data, now it's instant.

Now the question(s):

Would disabling "check for server certificate revocation" help the Forms servers connect to these older data sources more efficiently? Since we have 2 forms servers, one front end and the other back end, which server does the actual communication with the data source connection and queries, the routing service (back end) or asp.net in IIS(front end)?

Are there better alternatives that would solve this issue? As disabling this option can open the machine up to other problems that I've read about, and if there is a better way to do this I'd like to do that.

Thanks

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Replies

replied on May 7, 2021

Forms Server (IIS) is responsible for executing lookup. We plan to add a proxy wcf service in Routing service in Forms 11 update1 to allow DMZ Forms execute lookup without exposing database conenctions to public Internet.

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replied on May 12, 2021

Hi @Shengyao Que,

What should I be looking for in the IIS Manager that is responsible for this? Would it be the FormsAppPool?

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replied on May 12, 2021

Yes, FormsAppPool hosts Forms and FormsConfig site.

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replied on May 6, 2021

I'm not sure about the "certificate revocation" option, however, based on my experience I'm led to believe that the front end handles the lookups rather than the routing service.

The reason I say that is we have an internal instance and another in the DMZ, both pointed to the same database, and the settings in our DMZ limit authentication using domain credentials.

If we have a data source configured with SQL Authentication, is works both internally and externally, but if we configure it with AD credentials, it only works internally.

Since the routing service is only running internally, this leads me to believe that the front end is running the lookups, otherwise I wouldn't expect the host to yield different results.

Because the DMZ instance means all of our processes are available from the outside, we actually leverage this behavior to restrict which data sources can be accessed by forms on the DMZ instance.

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replied on May 7, 2021 • Show version history

I wasn't really clear, Lookups, once the data sources have done the initial connection, are relatively fast in forms, usually its 2-3 second response times on the database that has issues.

Its when we try to refresh the data source, to give a form access to a new table, is when we have issues.
The extremely slow connection takes the database thats working mostly ok 5 minutes. The other database, same server/version/machine, takes more than 7 minutes before it times out. We've never been able to update the list of tables that connection has access to.

This has made it painful to develop with that data source, and we usually ask the programmers for that system to just replicate the data to the database that is working.

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replied on May 9, 2021

Hi @████████, SQL server will try to verify some certificates of managed assemblies which may require connections to Microsoft or other public networks.

Can you please monitor the network connections on that specific slow SQL server machine, and check if there is some connections SQL server is making but somehow timed out?

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Technical question with Forms and Data sources

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