Benefit Hypothesis

Today, the Web Report Designer demo lacks basic functionalities like 'Preview', 'Open', 'Save', 'Upload', etc. due to limitations imposed by the FileStorage implementation.
This is unacceptable because the prospect clients cannot get a real-life impression of how the designer will work when embedded in their application, cannot test all of its tools, and do not see the immediate result of their efforts.
We envision a world where the prospects will be able to try out all the designer functionalities with only reasonable limitations applied.

Solution Scope

[RESEARCH PHASE]
The research phase will focus on identifying existing technical constraints and proposing a secure persistence model for demo usage.

Tasks:

• Analyze current limitations of WRD services in the online demo application.
  • Backend constraints (controllers and service guardrails).
  • Frontend constraints (TypeScript and UI-level restrictions).
• Design a persistence strategy that enables full functionality with controlled resource usage.

[IMPLEMENTATION PHASE]

Candidate Solution Approach:

• Session-based storage model:
  • Each WRD session is assigned a unique sessionId.
  • A dedicated, isolated FileStorage instance is allocated per session.
  • Storage is size-limited.
  • Storage is automatically deleted after a defined idle timeout.
• Intended to support manual, interactive usage only (not automation or scripting).

Acceptance criteria:

• Fully-functional WRD demo where the end user can perform all operations in a fair-usage manner, e.g. normal manual work, not through automated workflows.
• The client's storage comes pre-loaded with a few existing reports, assets, shared data sources, etc.
• Rate-limited requests;
• Size-limited file operations;
• No security-sensitive operations are allowed, e.g. PathTraversal, malicious file upload, breaking the application.

TBD:

• Permissions.
• Runtime theme change (when implemented, and if possible)

Existing solutions

DevExpress WRD Demo

Related OKR

TBA

Aha! Link: