So, part of the issue is that I don't have any version of Chrome(ium) installed in the container.  The readme and installation documentation do not go through any steps of how that should be done.  The message about running Chromium as root is interesting but I'm not sure if it is needing to be able to use sudo or something to escalate privileges.  I started with a base 5.3.1 container and just added chromium and I now get another error:

This was on a brand new install where I didn't configure anything so it might be an issue with having nothing to really export.

As a side note, I did try to run it on my actual deployment and then I get a different error:

Turns out that because of how the persistent data is stored in the container, the data/pdf and data/html directories were not being created from the install - because the entire data directory is a persistent directory so I had to do some work to make sure that they are created if they don't exist.  Not really a software related problem, just a result of how I'm building the image and telling people to use the entire data directory as a persistent volume.

The good news is that once I worked around this issue, I am back to the original "Failed to export report due to damaged software. It is recommended to reinstall the controller." error.

It seems like expecting chromium(and everything needed to run it) to be available in something like this which is commonly run out of a lightweight container is somewhat of a flawed expectation to begin with.

Anyone from tp-link have the software dependencies on the report generation feature?

  @mbentley 

I first received this one:

Installed the Ubuntu Snap and received this one:

Once I followed the above steps, I was able to export via PDF and CSV.

mbentley wrote

So which error in specific were you getting? What version of Chromium does the ppa you mentioned install?

 chromium --version
Chromium 83.0.4103.116 built on Debian bullseye/sid, running on Debian bullseye/sid