Corrupt PDF Files

[dCipher]

HI

I have an application that people access from Terminal Services and occasionally when they generate a pdf it is corrupt. The pdf seems to generate normally and then part way through it looks like all the text is over written in the top right hand corner. If you generate the report and view with vpeview it is always correct. This problem shows up intermittently only in pdf generation. The application is running on Windows 2003. Any ideas to the possible cause? I am using VPE6.1 Professional.

Thanks,
Simon

[IDEAL Software Support]

You are the only customer reporting such a problem. Maybe it has to do with the machine configuration, for example installed fonts.

If you are really sure that v6.10 is used on this machine - and not an older version, please e-mail us source code which makes the problem reproducible. If this is not possible (because it is a random problem), you can also send us also the VPE document file plus the garbled PDF file. Send both to our support e-mail address.

[dCipher]

It is not reproducible and only happens intermittently. Since no one else has reported this problem I will monitor it more and see if there are any clues as to the cause. It is most definitely version 6.1.

[IDEAL Software Support]

Since you are talking about a server application: If it is multi-threaded, make sure to set the property "EnableMultiThreading = true".

Have you already done this?

[dCipher]

Hi

I finally discovered what was causing the corrupt PDF files. The users were emailing the pdf reports to customers however they occasionally left the email message empty. The application uses CDOsys.dll to send the email and attachments. When this happens the email attachment gets corrupted. So the pdf generated by VPE is fine the problem arises in how the attachment is handled when the email message is empty.

Simon

[IDEAL Software Support]

Thank you for the updated information. CDOsys is from Microsoft. Don't they provide an updated version that fixes the problem?

If you are using Extended MAPI, maybe you can workaround this problem by instructing VPE to use Simple MAPI (or vice versa). See the property MAPIType.

[dCipher]

I am currently using the version that is available on Windows 2012 R2 so the simplest solution was for me to guarantee the message is never empty. So if the user does not include a message I just force the message to be "No message". Simple and effective.

Simon