Hi everyone,

I've been unable to find the answer to this question in my searches.

We have a compound PDF that has 2 alpha fields that are concatenated together, each is A250

The data has loads of special characters in it. While each report can be run individually, it crashes when we compound the 2 reports. It works fine in HTML

Does anyone know of any special characters that cause a compound pdf to crash? Some of the characters I'm seeing are single quotes, ampersands, less than or equal to signs, pound signs, plus signs, percent signs and many more. If I can identify the characters causing the problem, I would be able to fix the code. If not, I'll open up a case. This is in release 5.2.8

Thanks in advance,
Carol

PDF files contain tags, similar to html. If your special characters happen to be a tag in pdf, that may cause issues. I saw that in a Java/eActual project.

Without seeing code it would be difficult to tell, bu the quotes (without special coding) and the ampersands and ones that would be likely problem candidates, with the left and right carets and plus signs also possibilities, depending on relationship to other characters. Again, it's odd that the actual data would cause the problem, since it's not even know when the provedure is parsed.
Did you try putting -RUN between the procedures?
Also try putting a WRAP= in the stylesheet for the concatenated column. Now that I think of it, It seems that I ran this once when using extremely large columns in PDF documents.
Maybe try changing the format from A500 to A500V.
There's a few ideas, anyway.

Carol, it must be due to a set of consecutive special characters, I can't see how an equal sign or a plus sign could do damage on its own. As well, since it's only happening in a compound report, it sounds like a bug.

Have you tried reproducing this using the CAR file (with DEFINE's for the alpha fields)?

Thanks for responding Lusheng, Darin and Francis.

I finally figured it out and I was way off on what was happening.

BTW, I was looking at someone elses code. She had loads of DEFINE statements where she used the equal sign instead of EQ I had her clean them up, and she missing a couple which corrupted the PDF.

When I removed one alpha field, it worked, so I thought it was the data. Turns out it was prior DEFINES.

Thanks again to everyone. Looking forward to Summit!

Carol