How to trouble shoot a WebFocus report failing due to Excel format issues
David Maillie
Data Scientist / Senior Lead Analyst at Ahold Delhaize USA (formerly Peapod Digital Labs and Retail Business Services)
This is a good trouble shooting walk through on an actual PR relating to a Web Focus report.
1) First, always check ReportCaster and make sure it is properly functioning. It is always possible that a large or improperly coded report could take down ReportCaster and it is vital that it be back up as soon as possible.
2) Next, after making sure ReportCaster is running with no issues, ask the user what the name of the report, location (folder), error message received (if not given) and time last run was. Below was the response. This gives exactly where the report (.FEX file) lives and the error message. It was last run at between 2 and 3pm.
3) With this information we can search ReportCaster and see what the logs state. Usually if a report errors out or fails the logs in ReportCaster will give an error message in red. If the report is not listed under ReportCaster, as is the case here, that is fine. It may have been manually run.
4) Next, you will want to go to the server and check the logs on the server. Enter (https://svrXXXXXXX:8121/bcstart.html) in the browser for Prod and for Dev just place a “t” after the server name. The below snapshot is from the Dev server (SvrXXXXXXXt):
5) Next, navigate to Workspace, Logs and Traces, Workspace Logs. This is where you will find the edaprintlogs (these were actually indicated in the error message in this case):
6) Click on the log for the appropriate date (10/28/2015 in this case) and select from the ribbon Edit->Find on this page. As you can see in the below example it has 9 matches. Now go to the one for the time frame where the error occurred (2pm – 3pm in this case).
7) Here it has the same error where it could not connect. You can also see that it does this every time the report is run (verify this yourself by running the affected report several times and see if you can recreate it – in this case it happened every time the report was ran):
8) Now, take the error information (I entered “Error in processing INIT command for Class ibi.jsexcel” into Google and was able to quickly find all the info I needed from the IBI support site and WebFocus forums. Basically, WebFocus experts do not recommend using EXL07 and instead recommend staying with EXL2K. EXL07 cannot handle some of the characters and features that EXL2K can. This results in reports failing. This is the same for WebFocus versions 7and 8. If a report uses any of the following it can and most likely will fail if EXL07 formats are used in it.
9) There are patches and fixes proposed by members in the forums to get by this, but they are piecemeal and don’t always work. Also, many involve changing registry files which could potentially cause more problems. This would be tedious at best. Instead, until WebFocus provides a better method and documentation it is best to stick with EXL2K.
10) Also, it has nothing to do with Java or the Java heap size as some propose – you can change it to whatever you want and it will still have the formatting issue and fail. Below response is typical and from a user with version 8:
David Maillie is a technology aficionado and sales superstar available for speaking, training and education to groups, businesses and charities.
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