Hi

Sporadically I get a situation where you are in
a reporting window with amper autoprompt and it jumps to another window and will jump back again when you try to return to it. The window it goes to is normally Outlook, but this may be because Outlook is generally always open.

This may be a WF or an IE problem because the solution is close all IE windows and reopen.

John

John,

Do you have Office 2003 installed? If so that may be a possible source of the problem.

I can be merrily typing away in an application (doesn't matter which one) and all of a sudden some other app (normally Outlook as you state) gets focus. I then find that I've typed into the "ether" as I look at the keyboard and have to remember what it is I wanted to type (not all of us are touch typists - just tight and ......)!

Most infuriating

T

Thanks Tony

We on W2k version of office although moving to 2003 shortly.

I'll put this down to Office and more specifically LookOut rather than WF, since a couple of users have moaned about this.

Regards

John

I've sussed out what causes this now.

This problem occurs when you start another request before the agent's finished processing your previous request. (Amper autoprompting and you realise that the parameters were wrong or its taking too long).

When you start another request you dont kill the original request and the agent ploughs on and eventually tries to talk back to the IE window that requested it and this messes up all the Amper Autoprompting facilities.

This could be considered an IE bug or a wf bug. Certainly it would be nice if killing an IE window would kill the agent which in turn would kill the database request but that's probly ranked as a 'nice to have' rather than essential for IB.

Anyone get the same problem? Does IE7 cure this.

LookOut
i would argue that killing a window should stay just the way it is...that sometimes a long job exceeds browser timeout and you want to the job to run...if you gotta kill a job for real, kill it for real. sometimes i want my users to be able to launch and then close and go do something else...and not sit and wait.
but that's just me.

Susannah I disagree - it would be great if killing a window would kill the agent. It would even be better if it would kill the database request, too. This has always bugged me about WF.
Usually the user just types in the wrong parameters, realizes the mistake, and kills the window.
Since the window is gone, the user isn't going to get the result anyway. If the report takes longer than that (or the result is just saved to disk), then Report Caster is the way to go. (Or running deferred if you are on MRE).

We have quite a few problems with orphaned agents, and have to put various processes in place to try to catch them before they eat up server or database time. Our architecture folks really hate this behaviour of WF.

Of course one way to solve Users killing the browser because of incorrect input is to have trained and skilled (or intelligent?) Users (yeah right, like that's ever going to happen!!).

Oh the joys of client server communication!

T

Talking of Nicknames for Products:

Tony had quite a good one for Windows - Windoze.

Normally I refer to Norton Internet Security as "Not on" Internet Security.

Wrod is my WordProcessor of choice having killed off the rest of the competition.

Any other suggestions - after all it is Friday afternoon!

But of course -

Microshaft

T