Changing Ad Hoc from Sample/Full Data to No Data outside of Ad Hoc editor

Problem

You have an Ad Hoc report that stopped loading and times out due to data volumes increasing. Ad Hoc report still works fine. You want to edit the Ad Hoc View and would want to change it to Sample or No Data mode to enable that editing, but opening it in Ad Hoc Editor is not possible. What can be done about this?

Solution

You can change the data mode by exporting the Ad Hoc Data view using Right Click -> Export (as superuser or an admin user), unzip the archive, locate and edit the state.xml or stateXML.data file and change the data mode in the first line:

<unifiedState dataSize="full" [...] ignoreMaxRows="true" [...]>

Change to: dataSize="sample" or dataSize="nodata", AND ignoreMaxRows="false", do not change anything else, archive it back, then import with update flag (Manage > Server Settings > Import). Make sure that the resulting zip folder structure is the same as it was, i.e. the index.xml should be on the root level. When you re-zipped the archive, you probably have the folder on the top level.

When opened, the zip should look like: zip:

--resources

--index.xml

If you have: zip:

--somefolder:

----resources

----index.xml

... it will complain. When you import, you point at the zip file, not just XML file.

Notes

You can export the View without dependencies, but it will give you a warning on exporting and on importing, when importing choose "Include" and it should work.