Book Manager &/or unstable subject ID#'s in Desc Indented Narrative reports

[Nick Shelley 0]

Has anyone come across any concerns about the Subject ID# setting in Descendant Indented Narrative Reports not sticking in saved reports? This seems to happen to me a lot and totally undermines the use of Book Manager to complete a series of reports automatically.

 

I am still unsure what process is required to trigger it but I have in the past had numerous error messages arising when using Book Manager and I am wondering if the unstable subject issue is to do with them.

 

Something is not quite right:

 

I decided to do a trial to see if I could trigger a ID# change. I took two of my pre-existing Descendancy Indented Narrative reports, changed their output file name and put them into a specific book called Subject stability test.

 

I then ran the book. The results were as follows:

 

Trial 1: The first report completed but at the end an error message indicated that 'variable 288 is not found' (Help does not recognise this). Given Cancel/No option, I chose 'cancel' but TMG took this as the message to close the whole project and asked me if I wanted to backup the project! 'Cancel' cycled in a loop. 'No' gave me the error message 'unknown member ROTOOBARMAN' and further 'Cancel/Ignore' options would not get me out of this. In the end I had to Ctrl-Alt-Del and even then Windows gave me a separate error message.

 

Trial 2: I restarted TMG and ran the the first report on its own to check that there was no bug in the report itself. It worked fine. I then ran the book report again having checked that the ID# setting in the two reports had not changed (they hadn't). Both reports ran to completion but both gave the Word 'Link' message for exhibits when screen messages are meant to be ignored. Both required that I press OK before the Book Manager could continue.

 

Why did this second run through work whilst the first had not? The main change that I could think of was that in the first trial I had set up a new book report. Also that the output files had not previously existed whereas in the second report the output files had to be overwritten (which I had already preset within Book Manager).

 

Trial 3: To check whether overwriting the output files was a factor, I deleted the existing output files but it made no difference, the book report went through as in Trial 2.

 

Conclusions: there is/are something(s) independently wrong in Book Manager, Also I was unable to find the event which triggers the Descendancy Indented Narrative report ID# change. To save me hours of playing around, does anyone already know about this error anyway?

 

On thinking again about these two issues: the error messages in Book Manager and the slippage of ID# settings in the Descendancy Indented Narrative Reports, it is possible that the latter are being generated by Book Manager's problems rather than the other way round. For, even if the ID#'s for the reports are being changed, that should not by itself cause an error message, you would just get an inaccurate report.

 

I have about 36 pre-saved Descendancy Indented Narrative reports which I have tried to automate in Book Manager by running them in sequence as a 'book'. Checking them today, I noticed that since October when I last had to individually check each subject ID# and then run them all, all of the ID#'s had changed. In almost all cases, the ID#'s had changed by 4 digits (just at this moment I can't remember if the new, wrong, numbers were larger or smaller), but what I mean is that the numbers changed for example from 2042 to 2046.

 

Nick Shelley

[Jim Byram 0]

Book Manager does have some instabilities that are proving difficult to trace. However, under no circumstances should it actually modify the report configuration of a report being run. I've reported the issue. We might have to come back and ask you for data to replicate the issues.

[Nick Shelley 0]

Happily, Jim

 

It would be useful to know when Book Manager is working well as it is a feature that I would wish to use regularly

 

Nick

 

Book Manager does have some instabilities that are proving difficult to trace. However, under no circumstances should it actually modify the report configuration of a report being run. I've reported the issue. We might have to come back and ask you for data to replicate the issues.