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I have this issue where I go to open a fex and it is blank. ...


Evan Brown 2

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I have this issue where I go to open a fex and it is blank. This can even happen in our production environment where there is no way there should be a blank fex. Not sure if its the cause, but both times this has happened to me I remember appstudio either opening a fex really slowly or crashing before I noticed the fex was blank. I already have a case open for this issue. If anyone else has experienced this what did you do to fix it

Its best if we know this happened ASAP so we can get a backup. Im wondering if we need a job of some sort that checks for a blank fex or maybe a very small sized fex file. Has anyone ever created something like this and could share the solution Thanks!

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I work with Evan and we literally have no code in the repository. Everything (well 99.9999%) is on the Reporting Server. Weve been using WebFOCUS since 4.5 and FOCUS for HP-UX before that. Weve always stored everything on the Reporting Server and never saw any reason to do otherwise. This seems to happen when someone opens a fex and during the save process, App Studio crashes the network connection is lost. I think it has more to do with the environment we operate in, in this Covid world. Evan is using VPN to access the reporting server and I remote VPN to my desktop at work and Ive never had App Studio or Dev Studio crash.
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Our fexs are on the reporting server also, not the repository. If Im understanding the issue, Ive had that problem also, sometimes. But it hasnt happened in quite awhile. Ive been working at home (using VMware to connect to office network) since the pandemic (almost a year) and I dont recall it happening working at home. So I think when it happened, I was mostly working in the office directly on my office computer.

As I recall, when I had the problem, it would be from opening a .fex, or maybe .HTML, in App Studio and the canvass would be empty. But when I closed file, I would be prompted to save changes. I would hit no and the file remained as is (not empty). I may be conflating my error messages, but I think I would also get a 6000 or 6001 error message when this happened - or maybe they were for other issues. I havent had those errors in quite a while also.

As Babak suggested, many times, Ill look at a fex using Notepad in Windows Explorer - its much quicker than using App Studio. Though, I cant do that with HTML pages.

Thanks,

Mark

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It helps to have some kind of version control in place. In cases like these, you can simply revert the changes to the last committed ones.

In other cases it provides a detailed log of what was changed, when and why (provided the committer wrote a useful commit message) and which other files took part.

In recent releases, ibi even supports some version control systems with their repository, although we have no experience with that (ours is not among the supported VCSes).

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Just starting the upgrade process (kind of). Our ultimate location is z/Linux, but the only SQL database available to z/Linux in this shop is mainframe DB2. With mainframe DB2 we had to preallocate the tables (per ibi ddl). The install wont create them for you. If we dont get that to work, it will be Derby until we can find a better option.
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Hi Evan

This sounds very familiar to an old Dev Studio problem where somehow Dev Studio would lose its connection to the client and youd feel Dev Studio hang when you tried to Save. Even if it says something went wrong with your save, youd think thats okay - I have a recent save that was good. So you close your editor and try to reopen the old one.

The bad news was that even your recently saved copy is now a zero byte file. All your code has been overwritten.

All I could learn by tracing that was that DS opened the connection but couldnt close it properly. This left the file in limbo and you end up deleting the guts of your file.

So - if AppStudio is doing this to you, if you ever encounter an error saving your work, be sure to Select All and Copy then paste the code to your favorite editor. Only after you do that is it safe to close your editing session.

I think the times this happened to me, I was working at a place where multiple sign ins were triggering an issue. For example, I might be signed in via a web browser, then start up Dev Studio, then back to the web browser And all of a sudden by Dev Studio connection wasnt good. This was way back in 7.6.9 days around 2009. Surely things are better now

If my description sounds like what you encounter, try watching your AppStudio traffic with Fiddler. Maybe itll give you a clue whats going on.

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