"Cannot create File" error

rbuser

Hello everyone. I have a short, simple report that used to work fairly well
until recently. Now, if the report is one page or less, there seems to be
no problem. But if the selection criteria creates a multi-page report, I
get the first page in preview, but this error shows up. Further, if I
choose to try to go to the next page, I get "metafile is not valid".

The application resides on a network drive. Many of the domain locations
have changed, so it is entirely possible that a directory or user is not
configured correctly. Most workstations are running Windows 2000. I have a
feeling that Reportbuilder is trying to create a temporary cache file on a
drive that does not have the proper access rights. Can someone tell me the
background processes that create a report? If a temporary cache file is
involved, where does it try to create the file and what rights are needed?

Thanks!
Debbie Erickson

nicocizik

Hi Debbie,

We have never encountered behavior like this before. Are you using the
end-user designer at run time? The designer will try to create the
rbuilder.ini file in your Windows\System directory unless you have it set to
store in the registery using the iniStoragetype property. As a test, change
your library path to point towards \RBuilder\Source and set your debugger to
break on exceptions. This will hopefully show where (in the RBuilder code)
the error is occuring.

--
Regards,

Nico Cizik
Digital Metaphors
http://www.digital-metaphors.com

rbuser

Hello, everyone. Thanks you for replying to quickly, Nico.

The report is not an end-user designer type report. I searched on the
internet for this behavior and found references to it in QuickReports. They
discovered that the length of the user's environment variable for TEMP and
TMP were too long for their engine to handle. So I tried the following and
it worked, sort of. I'm looking for a better workaround.

Quick Reports, and apparently Reportbuilder, too, use the environment
variables to determine where to create their temporary files. For each
user's computer, I need to pull up the control panel --> system --> Advanced
setting -->environment variables. There are two panes of variables. The
user variables, if present, contain the settings used. The path for the
user variable TEMP is over 60 characters long in my case. If I delete TEMP
and TMP from the user pane, Reportbuilder will then use the system settings
of "C:\WINNT\Temp\" in the case of Windows 2000. The IT Manager does not
want to go to every computer and delete these entries. Is there anywhere in
Reportbuilder that I can set a default path for the temporary file creation?
Basically, I want it to use the system path, ignoring the user path.

Thanks!
Debbie Erickson

nicocizik

Hi Debbi,

I searched our code and the only two times ReportBuilder is creating a file
in the default Windows temp directory is when using the CacheManager or when
printing to an Archive file. Unless your report is very large, you should
not need to use the cache manager. Are you by chance using the Archive
device?

--
Regards,

Nico Cizik
Digital Metaphors
http://www.digital-metaphors.com