DeeGee Posted January 19, 2011 Posted January 19, 2011 Does anyone have any ideas? We've set up a new SIMS installation at a school with whch we're federated, and I'm trying to set up individual reports containing assessment data. The reports sometimes preview correctly, but never print, export or upload. More than 50% of the time they don't preview either. What happens is the progress bar comes up, displays "generating", then as the generation finishes and it's about to preview/print/export, I get a windows Error message "Sims.net has encountered an error and has had to close..." I've worked through the relevant checklists regarding tables and security settings and random number and all that, and I've tried to generate on three different versions of Word. I'm currently using Office 2003, and that's the only office suite that's installed. It's been most stable this way. It's a VM ware machine running Windows XP, but I've tried it on a physical machine and found the same difficulty. I've been working on this for three months now, I've missed at least two deadlines, and I'm still no nearer a solution. I could produce a mail merge with results exported from SIMS into excel and then merged into Word, but that's not going to be the best way to have the most up-to-date results and that won't upload to Linked Documents. I'm seriously struggling with this. I've been doing exactly the same thing at my usual school for the best part of four years without so much as a sniff of trouble, I just can't see what's going wrong. I maintain that the problem lies with our SIMS install, but I can't get Capita to admit to anything. Anyone ever come up against anything like this before?
LosOjos Posted January 19, 2011 Posted January 19, 2011 There are a couple of things you can try, none guaranteed to work but a mixture of these routines have saved my back side in the past! First of all, have you ran the 'Verify Template' routine? You do it from Word itself when editing the template, it's in the same menu as where you add aspects to the document. This will work through your template and verify that all the aspects you have added are valid (it can take a while so bare with it). If that comes up with any errors, replace the tags it lists and try again. Another thing you can try is cloning the template. Daft as it sounds, sometimes the cloned template will work! There is also a manual clone (so to speak). Open up the template, save it under a different name and close it. Now create a new, blank template, and copy & paste all the information from the file you saved earlier. Finally, it may be that the generate template routine is maxing out your connection. You can test for this by trying to run the routine on the server itself rather than a client machine. Let us know if you get anywhere with that lot
DeeGee Posted January 19, 2011 Author Posted January 19, 2011 Cheers LosOjos, I can't remember if I've done "Verify Template" or not. I'll do that now. Cloning's an interesting one. I've tried the normal clone, and that if anything is more unstable. I'll have a go at a manual clone next as well...
LosOjos Posted January 19, 2011 Posted January 19, 2011 One down... Have you tried manually cloning yet? Also don't know if you saw it because I edited my post but try running it on the server itself too. If all else fails, I'll happily take a look at it for you if you export it and email it to me (PM me for my address). At least then we might be able to tell if it's your SIMS setup or a problem with the template itself.
PhilNeal Posted January 19, 2011 Posted January 19, 2011 As always please drop me an email and I'll investigate. We will put our hands up if we've made a mistake!
DeeGee Posted January 19, 2011 Author Posted January 19, 2011 LosOjos - manual clone - not worked. In fact, manual clone won't even preview! Unfortunately I don't have remote access to the server to try that - it's on a different site! I thought it might be the remote access that was causing the problem intially, which is why I've run it on a physical machine to see if it resolved the problem.
LosOjos Posted January 19, 2011 Posted January 19, 2011 LosOjos - manual clone - not worked. In fact, manual clone won't even preview! Unfortunately I don't have remote access to the server to try that - it's on a different site! I thought it might be the remote access that was causing the problem intially, which is why I've run it on a physical machine to see if it resolved the problem. It's definitely worth a try if you can get somebody on site to run it from the server machine, we have to do the same with some of our larger reports. If you want me to take a look at your template for you I'm happy to, just PM me Also, as you're relatively new around here, PhilNeal (who posted above this) is a SIMS director and a great guy to contact with SIMS issues
DeeGee Posted January 19, 2011 Author Posted January 19, 2011 Cheers, I'll e-mail Phil with the background to this. I'm sure the template's fine - it was originally exported from another establishment, but has been rebuilt three times now. I've been doing these things for a few years now. SIMS support have seen the template, with our data and doc storage and it runs fine. I've run the equivalent on the parent site, processing three times the amount of data, on a virtual machine with no difficulty...
TimH Posted January 20, 2011 Posted January 20, 2011 I'm sure the template's fine Have you tried a test report with different/simple template ? i.e. is the report template causing the issue ? It could be a memory issue, I've just replaced our school logo bitmap with a vector emf version and cut printing time from 3hrs+ down to 20 minutes for a 2 page whole year group print. Also, are all of the tags really valid, you say the template was from a different school, were the tags copied or re-entered - I just discovered that someone in our school had used search/replace on an individual report template to switch Yr7 to Yr8, it doesn't work, it only changes the visible text not the tag behind it. Oh, that reminds me, take a look in the XML tamplate via a text editor/web browser or in Word use options to show hidden text to examine the tags. tim
DeeGee Posted January 20, 2011 Author Posted January 20, 2011 Escalation team are remoting in having a look now. Of course, I can't get the error to recur! Tags are valid - I've re-entered them. Even the reports I'm building from scratch aren't working...
DeeGee Posted January 20, 2011 Author Posted January 20, 2011 Pulling the JPG out has now made the report generate. This is a blessing, I suppose, although I can't understand why it works fine with a jpg on one site but not another!
LosOjos Posted January 20, 2011 Posted January 20, 2011 Was it a particularly large JPG? I've just had a problem with one of my templates taking a hell of a long time to generate (45 minutes per reg group, roughly 30 students!) and it was because I had lazily resized our logo in Word (the logo is on each page) rather than truly resizing it to reduce the file size
vikpaw Posted January 20, 2011 Posted January 20, 2011 (edited) Memory seems to have been the issue? I've found this problem recently and it's hard to get around. I was thinking it might be cos we have clients on windows 7 with office 2010, but even a vm with XP and office 2007 was failing. My old XP box with office 2007, is the only one that doesn't seem to get this issue. Very bizarre, as my reports don't have a logo on them, as we print onto headed paper. The only workaround we had for our reports last week was the Deputy Head in charge was able to preview one at a time and print, so we had to do it the long way around, fortunately it was only for IB so not so many students, but i'll need a fix for the larger year groups, so any other info you get will be v.useful. Whilst at BETT i ended up remoting to my machine and exporting a load to a shared folder which seemed to work okay. EDIT: worth looking at permissions if you are on a different site, then the permissions on the local machine may be different, and sims / office will use the local temp folder / application data folder a lot. However, this wouldn't explain why it occasionally works. Edited January 20, 2011 by vikpaw clarity + addition
DeeGee Posted January 21, 2011 Author Posted January 21, 2011 LosOjos: I've had a little look, and it was a huge png file. For some reason I can't put a vector version into Word, so I've deleted the whole thing and used a text logo for the time being. Graphic logos have been causing reports on the other site to be very slow generating as well, so I'll have a look at both of them. Vikpaw: Thanks, I'll look at permissions...
LosOjos Posted January 21, 2011 Posted January 21, 2011 LosOjos: I've had a little look, and it was a huge png file. For some reason I can't put a vector version into Word, so I've deleted the whole thing and used a text logo for the time being. Graphic logos have been causing reports on the other site to be very slow generating as well, so I'll have a look at both of them. Vikpaw: Thanks, I'll look at permissions... You could make a reduced sized version of the image (file size I mean, not physical) and replace all instances of the logo with that. GIMP is a good free image editing tool if you don't already have one (here's a link in case like me you don't fancy typing GIMP in to Google!) GIMP - The GNU Image Manipulation Program
vikpaw Posted January 22, 2011 Posted January 22, 2011 Or Office comes with Microsoft Office Picture Manager which is great to for bulk resizing and cropping etc.
CAM Posted January 22, 2011 Posted January 22, 2011 Irfanview is a good little application I have used since my student days for image resizing. And it's free for Schools/Charities. IrfanView - Official Homepage - one of the most popular viewers worldwide
A_Baboon_in_the_room Posted January 31, 2011 Posted January 31, 2011 This happened to us a while back. The only way I found to reduce the instances of crashing was to print the reports after school closed when there was minimal SIMS use. That led me to assume it was a database timeout that caused the crash. Didn't have to get to the bottom of it as the solution was a patch sent from Capita. Now it only crashes about 5% of the time.
MISassist Posted January 31, 2011 Posted January 31, 2011 Read all above with interest.. I have the same at one of my schools, can't wait to get back in there this week to check out the format of the logo's etc as know they have added a new one recently, they had memory issue and al the main SIMS admin machines had an upgrade... It also opens up two word templates each time one is access via sims (in any any reports, not just individual but this is since rebuilt in CC4) Interesting and thanks all. M
JayCee Posted March 8, 2012 Posted March 8, 2012 I've read throught this thread with interest as I am having a very similar problem. So that I can catch up with you all, can anyone help me with this initial probem: I've found the report templates (ahead of verifying them), but when I try to open them in Word I am presented with the need to convert the file. None of the options I am given give me a readable template.
LosOjos Posted March 8, 2012 Posted March 8, 2012 I've read throught this thread with interest as I am having a very similar problem. So that I can catch up with you all, can anyone help me with this initial probem: I've found the report templates (ahead of verifying them), but when I try to open them in Word I am presented with the need to convert the file. None of the options I am given give me a readable template. Even if you select the XML option? That should work, if it doesn't then there is a problem with the template I suspect. You could also try disabling the prompt, in Word 2010 go to "Word Options > Advanced", scroll down to the "General" section and uncheck "Confirm file format conversion on open"
PotNoodleTech Posted March 8, 2012 Posted March 8, 2012 What's the specification on your sims server, cpus, memory, disk set up?
JayCee Posted March 8, 2012 Posted March 8, 2012 (edited) SIMS is running on Server 2008 R2 Standard. Intel Xeon X5650@ 2.66 x2. 16GB RAM. 442GB Free on SCSI HD. The client PCs are varied, but all Are XP SP3 with 3GB RAM. Cant open any of the docs, .dots or XMLs. Even with the compatibility prompt switch off (it was already). In fact everything in that sub folder of doc storage folder is promting for conversion. Hmmmm... Edited March 8, 2012 by JayCee
Sivadam Posted March 8, 2012 Posted March 8, 2012 This might not be relevant but have those that are having problems with AM7 and Profiles Reports read KB103768 on SupportNet?
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