Here is a strange case that happened to a customer today which is using Management Reporter 2012 CU15 and GP 2015 (I know they are behind on an unsupported version, but that’s not part of the problem). The financial controller of the company generated a report in GP that they’ve been using for years now and nothing was changed in the definitions at all. The output result was letting them puzzled.
As I logged remotely into the user’s computer to look at the issue, I was shown the related report definition and the used row definition as well, and there is where the situation became interesting. The user stated that all the linked financial definitions were gone on the right side of the page (like the example bellow which was taken from another screenshot). There were actually multiple +++ in a row as for adding multiple dimensions at once.
First thought was about someone changed or deleted some accounts in GP and the users echoed that no one touched anything in GP.. Strangely enough, when looking at historical reports generated in MR Viewer, the last good report version was shortly before Christmas break, and then everything that was generated after January 1st was returning empty reports with no data to show. It was affecting multiple reports relying on the same or similar row definitions.
I tried all kinds of exercises, including restoring the MR database from a previous backup before Jan. 1st, but to no avail. The dimension’s column would remain empty. That’s when I had some Ah-Ah moment and remembered that if GP doesn’t have all the same segment names across companies, this could be one of the issues. We tried to switch the default company over to the TEST company, but it was refreshed on Jan. 1st too as per the user, so no luck.
Googling for similar issues, I found this older blog post that confirmed what I thought. In essence, if any of the Account Segment Names have been changed, the references in MR will just be dropped as they can’t be linked back anymore. A quick SQL query of the table SY00300 confirmed that the data was indeed changed on Jan. 1st at 17:53 UTC time (which is around 1:53PM EST). The DEX_ROW_ID made me also think that the 4 original rows got dropped and re-created at some point.
Asking again, this time the user confessed that they had indeed run a CheckLinks in GP against all modules prior to performing the Year-End Inventory closing (which they did twice by accident, but that’s a story for another day). While selecting the CheckLinks option, they included the SYSTEM part of GP, which affects several part of GP’s security and many other settings apparently. The outcome was that the Account Segment Names had been reset back to default values.. Luckily enough, they had some archived “Historical” companies, and by looking up their content, we could restore back the original values of the Segment names. Opening MR Designer’s Row Definitions, and all the linked dimensions were showing up like magic. (Image below was copied from the other blog just for visuals).
Morale of the story: neve run a SYSTEM Checklinks, unless you know what you’re doing and you have a full backup of all your Databases (including DYNAMICS).
Hope that you enjoyed reading this and until next post, wish you a happy life.
@GP_Beat
PS: the SYSTEM CheckLinks also created another problem.. GP Security was reset for some 3rd-party ISV module and users couldn’t access them anymore.. This had to be reverted manually in GP. Luckily there were only a few ones.
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