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Problem Creating Report - I'd appreciate your feedback

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    #1

    Problem Creating Report - I'd appreciate your feedback

    I had an unpleasant experience creating my first A11 report. I'm very concerned and would like to know if any of you have experienced what I did.

    I used the Genii accessed from Control Panel "Reports". I took the middle option "Start from a blank free-form report".

    After completing a lengthy group header I clicked "Preview" and the report was blank. I saved what I had and attempted to go back into Design Mode and work on my problem. Design mode would not let me access my Report. Instead, I was greeted with the dialogue for the "Quick Report Genii". I knew instantly my report was a "goner".

    I started it over and only did half the work I did the first time and the same thing happened.

    I then started over again and tried to do something different in case I was unwittingly triggering a bug. My Report is all based on a Group Header and Footer so the first thing I did was remove the Report Header and Footer. I cautiously entered my Group Header a few objects at a time, then Previewing, then Saving and quitting, then re-editing. This time it worked. I continued working on my header until it was fully completed, and the Report is still OK.

    I'm extremely nervous at this point that as I'm near finishing this Report and have around 6-8 hours invested in it the Report will fail. I'll be in a bad place if that should happen.

    Can any of you relate to my experience? Misery loves company as we all know and I'd like to feel less alone with this problem. More constructively, when something like this happens is there anything we can do to salvage our work?

    I should mention that Al Buchholz wrote to me with helpful information and suggested something I didn't know about. He explained that I can right-click my report in Control Panel and there's a link at the bottom that allows me to restore any previous saves of this report. I should tell you that none of them worked for me. There were well over a dozen.

    I'm very eager to receive your feedback on what happened. Until this I've been making very good progress converting my 16bit A1 application to A11, in large measure because of the terrific support I've received here in your Forums.

    Thanks once more ... Sam Gerber
    Tags: None
    #2
    Re: Problem Creating Report - I'd appreciate your feedback

    Nope, works fine here.

    Right click on the table or set upon which the report is based and choose Zip.. Attach the result here for diagnosis.
    There can be only one.

    Comment

      #3
      Re: Problem Creating Report - I'd appreciate your feedback

      Originally posted by Stan Mathews View Post
      Nope, works fine here.

      Right click on the table or set upon which the report is based and choose Zip.. Attach the result here for diagnosis.
      Stan I have 4 copies of this Report at this time. The current one works. When I ZIP the SET will you be getting all of them or just the one which works (which won't help of course)?

      Comment

        #4
        Re: Problem Creating Report - I'd appreciate your feedback

        When you zip the set Alpha also zips the tables that make up the set, their support files, and the set support files. That makes anything having to do with the set and its tables available to the recipient of the zip. Any forms, letters, labels, browses, and reports.

        The current one works.
        Then your problem is solved?
        There can be only one.

        Comment

          #5
          Re: Problem Creating Report - I'd appreciate your feedback

          Originally posted by Stan Mathews View Post
          When you zip the set Alpha also zips the tables that make up the set, their support files, and the set support files. That makes anything having to do with the set and its tables available to the recipient of the zip. Any forms, letters, labels, browses, and reports.

          Then your problem is solved?
          Stan, I said in the 5th paragraph of my original post that I have it working now. But given my experience I have a low confidence level it won't go bad again. I thought you were asking to see the bad report so that you might determine how it went foul.

          Do you no longer want it?

          Comment

            #6
            Re: Problem Creating Report - I'd appreciate your feedback

            I'll be glad to take a look. I'm usually not good at reading past the first two paragraphs.
            There can be only one.

            Comment

              #7
              Re: Problem Creating Report - I'd appreciate your feedback

              I used the Genii accessed from Control Panel "Reports". I took the middle option "Start from a blank free-form report".
              First mistake.
              The Quick Report is not as easy as you might think Sam, so it's worth a go just to see how things are constructed.
              See our Hybrid Option here;
              https://hybridapps.example-software.com/

              Apologies to anyone I haven't managed to upset yet.
              You are held in a queue and I will get to you soon.

              Comment

                #8
                Re: Problem Creating Report - I'd appreciate your feedback

                It looked like a "pat" report for real neophytes, so I avoided it for that reason Ted. The Genii I used was very very familiar to me from the V1 days.

                You know, Ted, so many people here criticize me (not you) for hanging on to my old V1 "roots". They're so wrong in thinking that V11 is so amazingly new that it bears no resemblance to V1. I've already told them that a good part of Xbasic, the GUI user interface and calc expressions are all quite similar if not identical. This Report Genii is yet another example. I'm 75% finished with it and I haven't had to touch the Help facility, not that there's any real help there.

                Sorry for the mild rant. Something you said unintendedly triggered me to say this. Sorry.

                Comment

                  #9
                  Re: Problem Creating Report - I'd appreciate your feedback

                  Well gollee, Stan. If I want any future help from you I'm gonna have to learn to say the important stuff in the first two paragraphs.

                  Stan, the complexion of my problem just changed dramatically. This is so bizarre!!!

                  I copied over two non-working versions of my report to my test DB, so that I could ZIP the set for you. Would you believe that they work fine there but do NOT with the original DB?

                  Of course you would? But WHY!!!

                  And I also have to ask you that since they do work in a different workspace, shouldn't there be a way to rescue them and port them back to the original workspace? ... And thank you so much for asking me to send you their ZIP or I never would have discovered this.

                  Comment

                    #10
                    Re: Problem Creating Report - I'd appreciate your feedback

                    Delete the non working reports from the original database. Open the test database.

                    Select each report (in the control panel) that works only in the test database, in turn, right click and choose Export Layout. Note where you save the files.

                    Reopen the original database, reports tab of the control panel, right click in a blank area, choose Import Layout. Navigate to the location saved to above and import them one at a time.

                    Test the imported reports.

                    Report your findings here.
                    There can be only one.

                    Comment

                      #11
                      Re: Problem Creating Report - I'd appreciate your feedback

                      Originally posted by Myself View Post
                      Delete the non working reports from the original database. Open the test database.
                      Never hurts to do a workspace compact after removing problematic layouts. At the least a dictionary.Update("drive_path_yoursetname.set") and/or dictionary.Update("drive_path_yourtablename.ddd")
                      There can be only one.

                      Comment

                        #12
                        Re: Problem Creating Report - I'd appreciate your feedback

                        Stan, the procedure didn't go completely smoothly. When I went to do the import I was told that there already was a report by that name, and there really wasn't. You'll love what I'm about to say. I then decided to edit a second problematic report by a different name. It came up in the editor and all I did was a "save" on it, not a "save as". After the save, a report appeared with a name matching the report that I just told you was missing, and the name of the report I had loaded and saved disappeared. It appears that a single report had dual identities.

                        After all that confusion I tried to edit the report that didn't work before (the one that only had the header completed) and now it worked. Amid all the confusion I can't be 100% positive my import completed although I'm going to guess it did.

                        Stan, if you understood what I just explained, you're really a smart cookie!!

                        Regardless, I appreciate the routine you took me through with the export/import. I learned something neat on this day and that doesn't always happen.

                        --- Sam

                        Comment

                          #13
                          Re: Problem Creating Report - I'd appreciate your feedback

                          The support files for an Alpha dbf are themselves (with different file extensions) a dbf and its support files. Clear?

                          So it is unusual but possible for the indexes of support table to become corrupted or something be written incorrectly to the support dbf.

                          Frequent backups are your friend. You can restore the support files for a given table just as you would send them to a client to update their application. Having restored them you will have "updated" your installation to a known working point.

                          Further explanation: The specifications for all your layouts are stored in the support files. Should you be creating a report and saving it and something goes wrong, the specification record(s) for that report might get indexed incorrectly. You then have the same trouble you would have with lost record in a data table. You know it's there but you can't find it.

                          This is highly unlikely in the user environment. It is only when you are proceeding merrily along in the development of your report making frequent changes, tweaking one thing or another, etc. that the problem arises.
                          Last edited by Stan Mathews; 09-13-2012, 08:43 AM.
                          There can be only one.

                          Comment

                            #14
                            Re: Problem Creating Report - I'd appreciate your feedback

                            Thanks Stan. You're a treasure trove of knowledge.

                            Comment

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