ODBC Call Failed - Only On Large Print Job

[Hillary]

I have an Access Database linked to our main student databse. We are attempting to print Emergency Conact Forms from the Access Database. The data reports and prints fine from my PC, however they are having problems printing the data at the school.

At one school, they are able to print the report to screen just fine. There are about 500 pages in this report. When they try and print to the printer, Access gives a message "Printing 1 of", "Printing 2 of", etc... but nothing comes out of the printer. I had her cancel the job and Print pages 1 to 2. They printed fine. Then I had her print Pages 1 to 50. Access did the "Printing 1 of", "Printing 2 of" again until it got to "Printing 50 of" then the reports finally printed out of the pinter.

So I had her just print the whole report, all ~500 pages. It took about 1 1/2 hours for Access to go through "Printing 1 of", "Printing 2 of", etc... until it got to "Printing 463 of" then Access gave the ODBC Call Failed error and printed nothing!!!!

Any ideas??? Is it timing out??? If it is timing out is there anything I can do???

Thanks for your help!

Hillary

 

[PCLewis]

The first issue is just a windows printer setting. They are spooling the entire job before printing. This is quite normal.

The ODBC error might be timing out or there might be some data that causes a problem. If it is happening consistently, you could set them up to print to a file for now (to save paper during tests). I tend to think it could be something even more primal. If your print job is getting quite large, you might very well be creating too big a spool file. I have seen unrelated/incorrect error messages when databases get to 2GB and it's possible the same happens when print files get there. 90 minutes of spooling a report could result in a massive file.

It's no more than guesswork for now but I would start by confirming if it happens in a consistent place, then after ruling out the print spool file size issue, place debug code in the report so that you can step in at page 463.

Hmmm, what happens if you tell it to print pages 462-470? If it were a data issue then you'd expect the same error at that point.

Sound slike a curly one for you and I know how painful these are to troubleshoot when a test run takes a long time. Good luck!!