Alpha Software Mobile Development Tools:   Alpha Anywhere    |   Alpha TransForm subscribe to our YouTube Channel  Follow Us on LinkedIn  Follow Us on Twitter  Follow Us on Facebook

Announcement

Collapse

The Alpha Software Forum Participation Guidelines

The Alpha Software Forum is a free forum created for Alpha Software Developer Community to ask for help, exchange ideas, and share solutions. Alpha Software strives to create an environment where all members of the community can feel safe to participate. In order to ensure the Alpha Software Forum is a place where all feel welcome, forum participants are expected to behave as follows:
  • Be professional in your conduct
  • Be kind to others
  • Be constructive when giving feedback
  • Be open to new ideas and suggestions
  • Stay on topic


Be sure all comments and threads you post are respectful. Posts that contain any of the following content will be considered a violation of your agreement as a member of the Alpha Software Forum Community and will be moderated:
  • Spam.
  • Vulgar language.
  • Quotes from private conversations without permission, including pricing and other sales related discussions.
  • Personal attacks, insults, or subtle put-downs.
  • Harassment, bullying, threatening, mocking, shaming, or deriding anyone.
  • Sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, ableist, or otherwise discriminatory jokes and language.
  • Sexually explicit or violent material, links, or language.
  • Pirated, hacked, or copyright-infringing material.
  • Encouraging of others to engage in the above behaviors.


If a thread or post is found to contain any of the content outlined above, a moderator may choose to take one of the following actions:
  • Remove the Post or Thread - the content is removed from the forum.
  • Place the User in Moderation - all posts and new threads must be approved by a moderator before they are posted.
  • Temporarily Ban the User - user is banned from forum for a period of time.
  • Permanently Ban the User - user is permanently banned from the forum.


Moderators may also rename posts and threads if they are too generic or do not property reflect the content.

Moderators may move threads if they have been posted in the incorrect forum.

Threads/Posts questioning specific moderator decisions or actions (such as "why was a user banned?") are not allowed and will be removed.

The owners of Alpha Software Corporation (Forum Owner) reserve the right to remove, edit, move, or close any thread for any reason; or ban any forum member without notice, reason, or explanation.

Community members are encouraged to click the "Report Post" icon in the lower left of a given post if they feel the post is in violation of the rules. This will alert the Moderators to take a look.

Alpha Software Corporation may amend the guidelines from time to time and may also vary the procedures it sets out where appropriate in a particular case. Your agreement to comply with the guidelines will be deemed agreement to any changes to it.



Bonus TIPS for Successful Posting

Try a Search First
It is highly recommended that a Search be done on your topic before posting, as many questions have been answered in prior posts. As with any search engine, the shorter the search term, the more "hits" will be returned, but the more specific the search term is, the greater the relevance of those "hits". Searching for "table" might well return every message on the board while "tablesum" would greatly restrict the number of messages returned.

When you do post
First, make sure you are posting your question in the correct forum. For example, if you post an issue regarding Desktop applications on the Mobile & Browser Applications board , not only will your question not be seen by the appropriate audience, it may also be removed or relocated.

The more detail you provide about your problem or question, the more likely someone is to understand your request and be able to help. A sample database with a minimum of records (and its support files, zipped together) will make it much easier to diagnose issues with your application. Screen shots of error messages are especially helpful.

When explaining how to reproduce your problem, please be as detailed as possible. Describe every step, click-by-click and keypress-by-keypress. Otherwise when others try to duplicate your problem, they may do something slightly different and end up with different results.

A note about attachments
You may only attach one file to each message. Attachment file size is limited to 2MB. If you need to include several files, you may do so by zipping them into a single archive.

If you forgot to attach your files to your post, please do NOT create a new thread. Instead, reply to your original message and attach the file there.

When attaching screen shots, it is best to attach an image file (.BMP, .JPG, .GIF, .PNG, etc.) or a zip file of several images, as opposed to a Word document containing the screen shots. Because Word documents are prone to viruses, many message board users will not open your Word file, therefore limiting their ability to help you.

Similarly, if you are uploading a zipped archive, you should simply create a .ZIP file and not a self-extracting .EXE as many users will not run your EXE file.
See more
See less

Crashes?

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

    Crashes?

    I'm a big fan of A4V6 except for the fact that it is constantly crashing - especially on a busy Monday or when I'm trying to get a last minute order out.
    Can anyone tell me if this problem has been solved with A4V7?
    I'm still using Windows 95, but hope to upgrade. Thanks for any help.

    Joan

    #2
    RE: Crashes?

    Joan

    I have switched to a5 now, but use/used a4v6 for a long time and it rarely had a problem. I had fwew crash problems, and when I did, they were found to be my errors


    Dave
    Dave Mason
    [email protected]
    Skype is dave.mason46

    Comment


      #3
      RE: Crashes?

      Hi Dave,

      It might be helpful to others if you post what those errors were that you found so that others may keep your experiences in the back of their mind when they experience crashes and possible have an opportunity to eliminate them.

      Thanks,
      Mike
      Thank you,
      Mike Konoff

      Comment


        #4
        RE: Crashes?

        The point Joan is trying to make is whether, given a scenario in v6 that causes a crash, does v7 NOT crash under the same scenario. I would be highly interested in learning whether left alone, the v7 upgrade alone will solve many stability problems. Clearly there are many situations where user error and design will bring the system down, but it's those other, inexplicable crash scenarios that it would be interesting to see.

        Separately, I noticed the same DPMI is being used in v7. I know there was an alternate DPMI offering that sometimes solved some crash problems in v6. I was hoping to see an improvement or upgrade in the DPMI technology.

        Comment


          #5
          RE: Crashes?

          Don't get mad - this is just intended to help...

          I learned the hard way - If my application crashes but others don't have the same problem, I'm probably doing something wrong. (Note: probably)

          Case in point: (This was an A5 app but concept is still applicable.)
          I recently developed an application that ran flawlessly on my single user computer but started causing crashes when run on the client's network. We later discovered that it worked flawlessly when only 1 or 2 people used it on the network. This made us suspect the network but a network expert checked it out - even temporarily ran all new external hardware for the network on the floor - and the problem continued. We now suspected a bad network card but it didn't seem to matter which computer was left off the network - as long as 3 or more used it, the system crashed. Finally, with the clients permission, I put the application on the network expert's own network just to prove that my application would work on a good network. WRONG - it still crashed. So, I spent a day and a half at the customer's office tracking down the problem and finally found a reference to an index named "Order_numb" that should have been "Ord_numb". There was no index named "Order_numb" but the script ran without error anyway. (OK, this could be considered a bug because it didn't send an error message but the basic error was still mine.)

          Luckily the customer was very patient as this took over 3 months to resolve.

          I'm not saying the problem is yours. I'm just saying, "Look REAL hard!" I have very few customers using A4 any more but those that did had very few crashes.

          Comment


            #6
            RE: Crashes?

            Thanks for your response. However, your response would suggest that Alpha Four v6 is perfectly stable and only user error can explain crashes. Why, then, does Alpha Software release version 7 saying that, among other improvements, it is more stable? What does stable mean? Resistance to user errors?

            I believe that there are situations where bugs exist within the code for Alpha Four (and almost every other commercial application) where instabilities cause crashes or other problems. Your point is not lost, however. It's true that there are some problems that are hard to find, which is the point I see you making. That is not, however, the issue I wanted to address. I wanted to address the issue of bugs within Alpha Four v6 that are solved in Alpha Four v7.

            Comment


              #7
              RE: Crashes?

              I have found at least instance where V7 would not crash while V6 would crash with either DPMI extender attached to it. I am running under Win98 SE.

              I have developed a mail label designed to print envelopes in the typeset mode. Apparently it had been partially corrupted in such a way that it would print exactly the way I intended. When I brought it up to edit and tried to hit the Alt-O command, however, it would crash every time on V6. When the same file was opened with V7, Alt-O took me to the options screen where an extra field was listed with very unusual properties.
              Field: % (percentage symbol)
              Type: * (asterik)
              Len: 11
              Just: L

              I tried to remove every field from the label and then put one back but the wierd field remained. I ended up deleting it and recreating it which completely solved that problem.

              I'd like to think the failure of V7 to crash indicates more stability and it certainly led me to a good solution fairly quickly.

              Al Palmer

              Comment


                #8
                RE: Crashes?

                Interesting. And very encouraging.

                Comment


                  #9
                  RE: Crashes?

                  Hi All...

                  Have to share this with you. I too, have a personal application I use daily. I've also developed and sold several others - they don't crash without reason! I couldn't understand all of you talking about crashes until I saw my really first recent one - On V7! - right after the upgrade on this personal program which has run flawlessly for at least 4 years.

                  Don't know why, but I examined the field rules of the crashing form and found a Trigger script attached on an 'exit field' event. The I remembered reading a 'readme.*' file in one of the upgrades prior to V7 that said "... not a good idea to use exit triggers..." Or words to that effect. I changed it to a 'enter' trigger on the next field and it stopped.

                  You can guess that I blamed the #@!$#%ed Alpha 7 for the problem and was W R O N G. It's been several days of the same use and no crashes!

                  SEE.....!

                  Ken

                  Comment

                  Working...
                  X