Frx For Dynamics Gp Troubleshooting And Interesting Rare Technical Support Cases

We are trying to report really unknown issues with all the versions of Great Plains including Dynamics, Great Plains Accounting for DOS, eEnterprise and as it currently known Microsoft Dynamics GP. This is one of the mystical errors and it is not really described in Partner or Customer Source on the Microsoft Business Solutions support portal. The error message says An invalid character was found in text content. Microsoft suggests check company setup table if it has more than one record, check fiscal periods. Unfortunately these recommendations didnt do the job. And in this small publication we would like to share with you the fix that we designed through several iterations:

1.Open FRx report and in detail section change from Financial and Transactions to Financial only. In this case FRx doesnt look at table GL20000 (posted GL entries for the open year) and GL30000 (historical years transactions) and it is only looking at GL monthly or fiscal period summaries tables. If now report works and opens drill down viewer try the approach to enable back financial and transactions and change targeted date one month into history. If report gives you results then we know the issue and it is in corrupt GL20000 table. Follow the recommendation in the next paragraph

2.In SQL Management Studio open new query and try the following statement: Select * from GL20000 where select * from GL20000 where TRXDATE>= '09/08/2011'(be sure to apply your judgement about current date as we are writing this paper in September of 2011) At this point try to be patient and review all these rows to detect if any column (likely text ones or containing ID) have humanly unreadable characters. If you find the ones do data repair on SQL Update statement level

3.What was not working as fixing solution? We tried maintenance check links with combination to GL reconcile in Utilities (to rebuild GL account summary tables) as well as rebuilding FRx Indexes file for the company. We also tried to find international characters in GL20000 table as this was the case of multinational company but we figured out that it was default SQL installation with Latin1_General_CI_AS_KS_WS collation without enabling something like Chinese, Japanese or Korean hieroglyphs or Russian Cyrillic alphabet

4.Great Plains versions potentially exposed to this error message. With some research and FRx source code we believe that these are all the versions including 2010, 10.0, 9.0, 8.0, 7.5, 7.0, 6.0, 5.5, 5.0 and 4.0. Please note that FRx is not available for Great Plains Accounting for DOS, Windows and Mac 9.5, 9.2 and earlier popular in the late decade of XX century

5.The future of FRx Financial Reporting Extender. Historically it was acquired by Great Plains Software but only partially and later one with the acquisition of GPS by Microsoft and forming Microsoft Business Solutions FRx Software was in uncertain situation. FRx in its technology architecture staked on MS Access based meta base and it is not technically compliant to new Microsoft geek such as .Net. Around the years 2009/2010 MBS introduced Microsoft Management Reporter with the concept to be very close to FRx but more open to current Microsoft .Net technologies

6.For additional information, please feel free to call us 1-866-528-0577 or 1-630-961-5918 (this number works for international customers) or email us help@albaspectrum.com We serve you USA/Canada nationwide via remote support (web sessions and phone/Skype conferences). Local service is available in Western Michigan, Chicagoland, Southern California (LA, Orange County and San Diego) and Houston area of the state of Texas