BCM reports to Excel > There was an error generating the XML docum

[BeijingDrew]

Hi.
We have five users using Outlook 2007 with BCM, all connected to the DB on a
server and working fine. Everything is updated to the latest version.

The problem is that we cannot successfully export reports to Excel. None of
us.

We run a report, click the export to Excel button and see a progress bar.
Then the popup "There was an error generating the XML document."

Not a particularly helpful message.

I am not a developer and have no idea where to look for error logs and such.

I have searched high and low and cannot find anyone with a similar problem
or solution.

Any help here?

Thanks

 

[Luther]

Hi.
We have five users using Outlook 2007 with BCM, all connected to the DB on a
server and working fine. Everything is updated to the latest version.

The problem is that we cannot successfully export reports to Excel. None of
us.

We run a report, click the export to Excel button and see a progress bar.
Then the popup "There was an error generating the XML document."

Not a particularly helpful message.

I am not a developer and have no idea where to look for error logs and such.

I have searched high and low and cannot find anyone with a similar problem
or solution.

Any help here?

Thanks

I heard of something in this area last week. Excel has tightened
security, and rejects certain types of URLs, specifically ones with an
@ sign. The symptom is the error message you are seeing. If your
report include a URL with an @ sign, try removing it.

 

[BeijingDrew]

Thanks.
Actually, it's looking more and more like the problem is isolated to the
Accounts by City report. I have no idea why.

For example: no problem exporting a quick account list with email and urls.
Here are the column headers:
Account Name
Primary Contact
Business Phone
Active
Source of Lead
Business Fax
Email
Web Page

But Accounts by City fails every time:
Account Name
Primary Contact
Business Phone
Active
Business Fax
Email
Web Page
Territory

I tried eliminating Territory and still fails (Even tried adding "Source of
Lead")

Unfortunately, Accounts by City is the report that I most need most of the
time.
Any thoughts?
Thanks
Drew

 

[Luther]

Thanks.
Actually, it's looking more and more like the problem is isolated to the
Accounts by City report. I have no idea why.

For example: no problem exporting a quick account list with email and urls.
Here are the column headers:
Account Name
Primary Contact
Business Phone
Active
Source of Lead
Business Fax
Email
Web Page

But Accounts by City fails every time:
Account Name
Primary Contact
Business Phone
Active
Business Fax
Email
Web Page
Territory

I tried eliminating Territory and still fails (Even tried adding "Source of
Lead")

Unfortunately, Accounts by City is the report that I most need most of the
time.
Any thoughts?
Thanks
Drew






- Show quoted text -

Are all your Territories just plain alphabetic, or do they have other
characters?
The error is about XML and XML has reserved characters (e.g. <, >,
and
XML also is limited to only having alphanumeric and a select few other
characters
as data. Diacritics (accent marks) may be a problem.

 

[BeijingDrew]

Thanks!
The 'Accounts by Territory' report works, so it seemed unlikely to be the
issue.
But your note about characters sent me looking at my Cities. Some had
apostrophes: Xi'an. I removed those: no luck. Some had dashes: Then I noticed
that some were entered incorrectly. It appears that one had a comma
(District, City). When I fixed this, the report exported fine. HOWEVER, now I
see that some others STILL have commas, and yet the export works. So it's not
as simple as 'no commas in the city field'. I suppose I could have forgotten
to actually re-run the report (as opposed to refreshing) after taking out
apostraphes, and so that was the culprit.

But at this point I am at a loss. One record 'incorrectly' formatted makes
it fail? With no hint as to how these need to be formated? That's tough.

But it's fixed.

Thanks for your assitance.
Best regards,
Drew

 

[Luther]

Thanks!
The 'Accounts by Territory' report works, so it seemed unlikely to be the
issue.
But your note about characters sent me looking at my Cities. Some had
apostrophes: Xi'an. I removed those: no luck. Some had dashes: Then I noticed
that some were entered incorrectly. It appears that one had a comma
(District, City). When I fixed this, the report exported fine. HOWEVER, now I
see that some others STILL have commas, and yet the export works. So it'snot
as simple as 'no commas in the city field'. I suppose I could have forgotten
to actually re-run the report (as opposed to refreshing) after taking out
apostraphes, and so that was the culprit.

But at this point I am at a loss. One record 'incorrectly' formatted makes
it fail? With no hint as to how these need to be formated? That's tough.

But it's fixed.

Thanks for your assitance.
Best regards,
Drew






- Show quoted text -

I don't think it would be a comma, that's too common to be a
restricted character. One thing I've run into that cutting and pasting
from other sources, some times a character may look OK, but not be a
regular character; e.g. one file had something like "foobar A" and the
'A' was the Greek Alpha character and not the Roman A.

I agree that BCM should catch these XML errors and give some
indication of where the problem is, or encode those characters in a
way XML can handle.

 

[BeijingDrew]

Good point. And likely the case for us. We have several people adding
information who probably use simplified Chinese as their default OS language.
I'm always looking at bad punctuation and such in other documents. Nobody
using BCM does, but the characters could have made it into the DB via import
from .csv.

I thought BCM handled Unicode fine, but...this seems like a very likely
culprit.
Thanks again.

 

[Luther]

Good point. And likely the case for us. We have several people adding
information who probably use simplified Chinese as their default OS language.
I'm always looking at bad punctuation and such in other documents. Nobody
using BCM does, but the characters could have made it into the DB via import
from .csv.

I thought BCM handled Unicode fine, but...this seems like a very likely
culprit.
Thanks again.







- Show quoted text -

Text in BCM has been Unicode since v1, which caused problems for other
Office apps that couldn't handle unicode files. However I haven't run
into those problems with Office 2007 apps. Unicode may or may not be
the problem in this case. If you ever isolate a string that causes
this problem, post it here or send it directly to Microsoft so that
they can investigate and fix the problem.