Crystal Reports is seemingly randomly adding characters into report output. This is so strange, I almost think we have a virus.
We have been running these same reports with the same version of Crystal reports for a good while now. No one has made changes to the reports and the database data is correct, but the output on the reports now have random characters (usually t's and i's) seemingly inserted at random in between and on top of the text. Even such simple fields as usernames are affected.
It is only doing this with PDF output. Also happens on development machine. Not only limited to server. It is not happening in the integrated Crystal Reports development environment within VS2010. If you preview the report there, it works fine.
Is anyone aware of any Crystal Reports issues that could cause this behavior?
Additional Information:
- Crystal reports v 10.5.37
- Running on Windows Server 2008, IIS 7, Also local Win7 dev machines
- All machines are x64
- Requested through ASP.Net 4 intranet site
- Database server is SQL Server 2008 R2
[UPDATE]
We have resolved the issue, though we do not know the actual cause.
In the answer I posted below, it mentioned Calibri causing problems with the PDF output. None of our reports were set to output in Calibri, but they were. We went through all of our reports and re-set the fonts to Arial and now the random letters are gone.
What still bothers me is that these reports were working fine for the past year up until yesterday. Why did it suddenly decide to happen now?
If I find any more information, I will update this question. We greatly appreciate those who took the time to help diagnose the issue.
We may have found a possible answer to the problem. It turns out Crystal Reports doesn't play well with other USP10.dll's on the system. If it grabs the wrong one, it is known to produce bad text output, especially when using calibri font.
Link to relative post on SAP Community Site
David Hilton's reply near the bottom of the page:
There were a few mentions of conflicts with usp10.dll. We need a very specific version of usp10.dll for our text rendering to work correctly. Often Microsoft Office ships with a different usp10.dll and can cause problems with our product.
I am posting this as an answer because it may help some people. If it turns out to be what resolves our problem I will mark it as the answer.
Related
There is an excellent article available at the following URL (below), but I cannot figure out where I can download a copy of Microsoft Visual Studio 2008. I've looked all over the Internet, but the download links are either not working (those that are at Microsoft), or they go to very suspicious looking websites.
https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/28792/Debugging-Classic-ASP-VBScript-in-Visual-Studio-20
Of course the other question that can be asked is, can this process be adapted to work on the most recent version (or at least a version that can actually be downloaded)?
Here's one link for you, straight from the horse's hands.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=13276
I have an ASP.NET Application I want to debug on localhost. When I run it without debugging, it runs very fast and smoothly, with about 3 seconds per page load. However, when I try to debug the app with Visual Studio and Chrome or Firefox, every page load takes about 20-30 or even 40 seconds to load, which is extremely slow. I have tried everything I found on the internet about these issues, yet none seems to help me out:
"Load all Symbols" from Microsoft Symbol servers, then uncheck that location
Delete all breakpoints
Uncheck "Enable property evaluation"
Other options I can't recall
Which is a good debugging configuration for asp.net apps? Any extra suggestions that may help?
Thank you very much and kind regards,
David
It is possible that your visual studio is using a lot of memory. You should try to turn off the browserlink which will reduce the amount of memory being allocated. It is still fine to disable the browserling and the preview still works.
Here is a guide and explanation
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/webdev/archive/2013/06/28/browser-link-feature-in-visual-studio-preview-2013.aspx
It is also possible that you have a lot of data or calculation to be ran in your form load.
Another possibility is a slow internet connection, this only applies if you have items or scripts on your page the are from an external source like JavaScript, CSS etc.
My company recently migrated to Visual Studio 2012 and I am using it to develop web application using ASPX pages. The pages are split with the C# in a code-behind file. After using 2012 for a couple weeks now, I noticed something: if my ASPX page does not correctly validate to the HTML5 standard (i.e. I am missing a closing tag somewhere), the page will not save. This problem does not occur in the code-behind file, nor does it occur on Razor pages.
I briefly looked through the standard Visual Studio settings pages, but cannot find a setting to allow invalid code to be saved. I also have Resharper installed (as well as the Productivity Power Tools), but cannot find a setting in either of those extensions that seem to relate to my issue. If it matters, the project I am working on is part of a TFS solution.
Has anyone else experienced this issue? If so, does anyone know of a setting that might have caused this that I may be overlooking?
Update: Since posting this, I have noticed that I am unable to save even after the page has been validated. It can take up to a minute before Visual Studio allows me to save the page. The length of time may be related to the amount of text that I entered before trying to save.
Update 2: After talking to a coworker who has a similar set of extensions, I determined that Resharper must be causing the problem. If anyone knows of a Resharper 7 setting that may be causing this, please let me know. I can't tell if this is a bug or an intended feature.
Final Update: Thank you to all who offered assistance, but after installing the Visual Studio Update 1, I no longer notice the problem. It seems to have been a bug that was fixed with the update.
As stated in the final update section in the question, after installing the Visual Studio Update 1, I no longer notice the problem. It seems to have been a bug that was fixed with the update. Problem resolved!
Grrr, still happening in 2015, and I don't even have ReSharper or Productivity Power Tools installed. I found a workaround. I quit VS, said YES to saving the items in the popup, reopened it, and found that they were saved to older statuses. I re-changed the code, saved (took many seconds but probably less than a minute), and recompiled, and the changes took this time.
It was nice that when I quit and saved (unsuccessfully), it at least showed that the code was in an older state, instead of showing the newer code with a perpetual asterisk.
I'd never seen this before, and hope never to again.
I've got a Windows 2008 Enterprise R2 Server running Ektron 8.02 SP3 that is causing me some trouble that I can't diagnose.
So my question isn't for a solution but simply how to better profile a .net application / windows server. Whenever you try to POST a form built by the software, it takes 8 seconds and change to return the page (on this specific server, it doesn't do it on other machines with the same codebase). It appears that it's trying to make a connection to something for 8 seconds, fails, then returns the page without error. Some more facts:
This is a beefy VM that is not being over utilized
The database is running on the same machine, so there is no lag there.
The 8 second delay even happens when submitting from the server itself
The event viewer for the server doesn't report any errors that seem related
Profile MSSQL doesn't report any issues either
Microsoft Network Monitor doesn't report any glaring networking issues, though its hard to say as the tool doesn't report long connection attempts clearly (from what I've seen of it)
I feel sufficiently confident that there is some process during the form POST on the server that is trying to make a connection somewhere, failing, and continue through the rest of the process. It doesn't report any errors and the forms all submit fine.
So, all that being said, is there anything else I can do to debug this? I feel like I'm shooting in the dark. Thanks for any help you can offer.
It sounds like this isn't an application you wrote. If so, the potential solutions are different.
A first level step would be to use Windows' Performance Monitor. Select the options (process and/or performance attribute to watch), then run the process through its paces.
If Performance Monitor can't help, you'll need to get into the real guts of the app. Most likely this will be more difficult than you want unless you're writing the app. You can debug a .NET app that is not your own using Reflector (paid) or ILSpy (free). HOWEVER, this can violate the license agreement (and likely does if the app has been purchased).
Apart from that, you're going to need to contact the product developer if you want to both stay sane and find this problem quickly.
we are making an application to run on both Mono and .Net. The application is web based, so it uses ASP.Net.
We are now trying to find some kind of reporting software. We would prefer if there was a designer that end users(non-programmers) would be able to use like Crystal Reports.
Currently, we are not finding anything that looks even barely capable. We will have shell access on the server that Mono is running from, so it doesn't matter if there is no true web-preview or something as long as it's capable of creating a PDF on the server in an automated way.
Has anyone seen any competent report writing software that runs on Mono? (Also, licensing doesn't matter as long as it's not GPL)
edit:
Really, even running something that isn't Mono such as PHP or something else light on dependencies would be ok as long as it would run on *nix systems. I just am having trouble finding anything for non-windows systems for the server and Windows systems for the designer(this is the justification for the linux tag)
We've finally found a reporting solution. It's not quite as pretty as Crystal or something like that, but it works, and that's what counts.
It is called FlexCel.Net http://www.tmssoftware.com/site/flexcelnet.asp
You basically design reports in Excel using special markup(actually, you can even design reports in OpenOffice cause thats what I had to do cause there is something wrong with Excel licensing for me)
It's pretty powerful and cheap, about $200 USD. I have already gotten a demo to run on Mono after about 5 hours of tinking and trying to understand how the demos worked. It's pretty neat though and well put together from what I've seen.. I'll come back and edit this answer if we later decide that this software is not good and we don't recommend it.
They commercially support running their software on Mono(except for the Winforms portions) and you also get full source code, so it really is a good deal. The range name = reporting band is a bit strange in the template, but it's still seeming better the more we use it.
Have a look at itextsharp
Your users can create PDF documents with fields, and then you can use the itextsharp library to populate it.
One thing I have been looking at recently is Jasper reports. Its just like Crystal Reports, and with JasperServer users can connect to it using the iReport editor. The hurdle I have is getting it to play nice with Mono See Running report on JasperServer from C#