I got this error when I open fex file I created although that fex file run well:
Error parsing MASTER File HOLD2 (( FOC205) THE DESCRIPTION CAN NOT BE FOUND FOR FILE NAME : HOLD2.
Any advice for this issue?
Thanks a lot.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: hainguyen,

The error is telling you that WebFOCUS cannot find the masterfile for HOLD2. So it could be that the HOLD2 file didn't get created because of the conditions of its TABLE FILE (look through all the errors to see if you can find something telling you why HOLD2 failed to be created).

Or you may need to explicitly tell WebFOCUS where to save the hold file by using the APP HOLD command at the beginning of your fex. I use APP HOLD BASEAPP to put it in a general location. But your system might have something different than BASEAPP (your admin should be able to tell you the name you need to use).

Thanks Kevin,
The reason I got the error is because I didn't save my HOLD file in BASEAPP. Some reports I just want to create HOLD file temporary and don't want to save it so I didn't use BASEAPP.

If it's in the same procedure[1], you don't need to save it to BASEAPP.

There are a couple of different scopes for HOLD-files. Here's my attempt at an explanation (I've never run across a document explaining these in WebFOCUS, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist):

Procedure scope
By default, HOLD-files go to a temporary directory in edatemp. That directory gets emptied (or deleted?) after the procedure completes. These HOLD-files are only visible to the connection (between the server and the client-machine requesting the procedure) that created them. Anything in them is available during the entire run of the procedure.

Session scope
You can also save it to FOCCACHE (provided that you enabled that on the server), which allows you to store hold files for the duration of a session.
A session can span several procedures, as long as they're run from the same connection and as long as the session hasn't been inactive for longer than the (configured) timeout.
Only the connection that initiated the session can see the files in the session.

Server scope
And finally you can store hold-files in an app-directory. Those are permanent and for all users/connections.


Finally, while this works well for TABLE-requests and such (as long as they're FOCUS code), it doesn't work so well if you want to -INCLUDE or -HTMLFORM such HOLD-files (typically in ALPHA format), which is Dialog Manager code.
Apparently DM doesn't know where to look for them, or we don't know how to tell it where to look. Even FILEDEF doesn't seem to help in such cases, or perhaps it would if we could figure out the full path to HOLD-files in edatemp or foccache.


Ad 1.: Mind that a report can call several procedures independently using, for example, the EX statement. They're not separate procedures when you -INCLUDE them though. That's why I used 'procedure' instead of 'report' in above explanation; they're often the same but not necessarily so.