Paradox Compatibilty Issue

[Langley]

I ran into a problem the other day and I want to pass it along to everyone else. This occurred on a Win2000 workstation on an NT 4 network, using Paradox 9 Runtime and Jet Direct (network printing software) version 3.30. When a Paradox report (any Paradox report - even just plain text) was sent to the printer it caused a GPF. We use a later version of Jet Direct on a similar system with no problem, so I am assuming the issue is with the older version of Jet Direct. It was not my system so I could not upgrade the printing software. I solved the problem by physically connecting the workstation to a printer and setting it as the default. Occasionally Paradox would report the error as a 'Compilation error', but usually just GPF'd. In case anyone is interested, I removed and re-installed Paradox and the BDE 3 times before chalking it up to Jet Direct.

Mac

"Do not delve too deeply in the arts of your enemy and so become ensnared by them"

langley_mckelvy@cd4.co.harris.tx.us

 

[footpad]

Mac,

While it's true that Paradox works best with printers captured directly to printer ports (as opposed to ones mapped using UNC paths), you might also want to check a couple of other things on the report itself:

-- See if the report was last saved with an active filter. I've seen this cause GPF's during printing, exiting, and other strange errors (e.g. Division by Zero) depending on the version of Paradox being used.

-- Verify that the report can find the stylesheet associated with with it. (The article at

http://techtricks.com/paradox/styleprobs.php3

discusses this problem in detail, as do the related ones on the subject).

Also, you might want to make sure you're using the SP4 version of Paradox 9. They didn't provide a searate patch for it; they only way to obtain it is to call them up and ask for an SP4 set of disks. I think they charge ~$30/US for the set, but it did seem to address a number of printing issues.

Hope this helps...

-- Lance

 

[Langley]

Thanks Lance. The report was a very basic report with no filters or other things. I even created a text only report and tried that with the same results. Thanks for the tip on the SP4 disk. Kinda sucks that they charge for it.

Mac

"Do not delve too deeply in the arts of your enemy and so become ensnared by them"

langley_mckelvy@cd4.co.harris.tx.us

 

[bigandfat]

I had the same problem going from Paradox 5 to 10 and had to change the object pal code to fix it. In Paradox 10 you must open the report before printing it. Here's what I did:
We changed old code:
method pushButton(var eventInfo Event)
var
repPrint Report
endvar
repPrint.Print ("DY09WDCL.RSL&quot
endmethod


To this code:

method pushButton(var eventInfo Event)
var
repPrint Report
endvar
repPrint.Open("NR:RUND5P.RSL&quot
repPrint.Print ()
endmethod

This ended the GPF & report printed although now a printer dialog box comes up prior to printing.
To the best of my memory, the code worked with paradox 5 running on Windows 2000, but GPF'd on Paradox 10 on Windows 2000.

I hope this helps.

 

[footpad]

Again, I suggest checking the stylesheets. Even if you don't use them, Paradox always saves a stylesheet with every document (form and report). When doing this, Paradox hard-codes the full drive letter and pathname of the current stylesheet (usually DEFAULT.F?).

The problem occurs when Paradox tries to locate that stylesheet when opening the document. There are a couple of legacy bugs regarding how the program responds when the stylesheet it's trying to find can't be easily located.

(I believe that opening a report in design mode before printing triggers a different error-handling rules than the ones used to handle direct printing. It's only a hunch, though, I've not seen the source.)

Nevertheless, I've made it a rule to always check stylesheets when printing problems appear. Most of the time, updating the stylesheet resolves GPF's, in my experience anyway. (Which is why I wrote up those articles.) YMMV.

-- Lance