PCAnywhere OLE Issues

[elektrobank]

I'm trying to use PCAnywhere in my application to transfer files and execute remote commands. I originally tried using the command queue but this won't really work for me because the paths I'm sending and receiving from are not going to remain the same. I have the OLE stuff working just fine, I can transfer files, receive them then execute a command at the end. When this whole process actually runs it works perfectly, however it does not work 100% of the time. Very often when I run this process it will just hang at one point and not do anything. It doesn't always hang at the same point, sometimes it's during the upload, sometimes during the download. It appears to finish the transfer but then just sits there. I can't cancel it or anything and have to force quit PCAnywhere on the host and remote machine. When I first started playing with PCAnywhere I found a few things that were causing hanging, such as if there was a path that I was trying to upload to that didn't exist or if it was trying to download a file and the file already existed locally. I was able to get around these problems but it's still hanging very often and I can't figure out what could be causing it. The hanging just happens randomly so I can't figure out if there is anything causing it that I can fix or if PCAnywhere just has these issues. It's also crashing every now and then, but I'm mainly concerned with getting the hanging problem solved first.
I was on version 11 but heard bad things about it so I went to 10.5 and I'm still having the same issues. My application is going to be used in a POS system that will be remotely managing hundreds of stores so this behavior is not acceptable. We have been struggling with these issues for months and don't know what else to do, this has delayed our release date considerable. Has anyone successfully been able to get PCAnywhere to work reliably for an application like mine? If so, how well has it been working and what can I do to get mine working? If not are there any other applications I can try instead of PCAnywhere?
Please let me know if any of you can help.
Thanks.

 

[rambleon]

Hi elektrobank
I have a simular system we run payrolls using pcanywhere
we recieve payroll details from the customer run the payroll programs and return the payslips to the customer.
I had the same sort of problems - I found by putting a pause of 5 seconds +/- between each stage (recieving, executing, returning) it seemed to solve most of the problems. Also the PC that was host waiting was used only for pcanywhere, as soon as you did something else on this machine the pcanywhere would start playing up.
I have a question the above system was working for customers that had PCA 10.5 how do I get the OLE to work on PCA 11

 

[elektrobank]

After months playing with the OLE I finally gave up. The company doesn't support it and it's way to buggy to use for a program I plan to release to the public. I ended up using the command queue instead and it works much better. I still use OLE but only to configure PC Anywhere. It should be posible to do the same thing with the command queue that you can do with OLE it just takes a lot more work. Overall I think PC Anywhere is a lousy program and I can't believe the company has no kind of scripting language that they support. I wish I could find another solution to use.

 

[rambleon]

elektrobank Hi,
After alot of playing around with PCA 10.5 and OLE I've got a pretty stable system for recieving, executing and returning files which I and our customers are happy with.
The problem is that alot of the customers are moving up (or is that down?) to PCA 11, I've been playing around with the command queue, copying files from remote to host and then
executing a batch file on the host is OK, except that it doesn't seem to wait until the batch execution finishes, before going to the next command in the command queque which copies files from host to remote, have you experienced this problem? Do you know if it's possible to port my OLE code from PCA 10.5 to PCA 11 ?
Is FTP a possible alternative ?
Thanks for your input

Rambleon

remote

 

[mykulwayne]

I currently receive a little under 90% through an FTP solution where the nearly 150 locations PUSH their data to our central server on a daily basis.

FTP tends to be very reliable.

Recently I just built my own PC Anywhere OLE automation functionality in hopes to ease the workload of persons responsible for grabbing data which didn't make it via FTP. Between both PUSH and PULL methods, I'm hoping by the time I am done that very little human intervention will be required for data transportation.

I believe we have a few sites with PCA 11 so I am curious to see what may happen. After your reading your posts it appears backwards compatibility might be a foreign term to Symantec.

I also understand the frustration in Elektrobank but I believe you got really caught up with the freezing and BS that occurs when you try to invoke commands on the PCA object before it had completely initialized yet. My solution (and others - if you move to other threads) was to watch for a CONSISTENT "Connected" response on the "connectionstatus" property of your PCA object. If PC Anywhere says its CONNECTED or FAILED for 5 seconds straight, go forward with the other commands. If you go too soon, the DLL hangs and you have to bust out with the CTRL ALT DELETE. Forcing your app to wait for this consistent response ensures things go smoothly afterwards.


I have comments on this and other behavior in the huge 150-post thread - if anyone knows of how to successfully receive files with wildcards (ie "c:\folder\files*.xls") using PCA OLE then please refer to that post and help.

As was pointed out, the documentation and support you will find from Symantec on the OLE is scarce to say the least.



Take care

Michael