Brad Marks
BradM at blackforestltd.com
Mon Jan 7 13:11:02 CST 2013
All, I do a lot of work with "report generation" applications that are built with Access 2007. These Applications are run at night in an unattended mode in a Terminal Services environment (via the Windows Scheduler). 99% of the time everything works nicely. However, every once in a while a problem will surface. When problems occur, I often look at the SchedLgU.Txt file which shows the results of Scheduled Tasks. Recently, I decided to experiment with the data in the SchedLgU.Txt file. I wanted to pull the data from this file into an Access application and create a easy-to-read report. I thought that this would be a simple task. I was wrong! SchedLgU.Txt is a strange file!!! When I treated SchedLgU.Txt as a linked Access table, I was not able to see any of the data. I spent quite a bit of time trying to understand why this would not work. I finally decided to look at alternative approaches. I found an example of a VBS script that could read the SchedLgU.Txt file and write the output to a new .txt file. I then was able to read the new .txt file with the Access application. At this point, I was smiling. The Access report that was generated from the new .txt file looked nice with a header, alternating detail line colors, a record count, and a footer. I moved the Access application from "Development" (Full Version of Access) to "Production" (Only Access Runtime available). When I did this, I started to see strange errors on the report. The report would show a "#error" at the start of page 2 of the 9-page report. I spent several hours trying to debug this problem but was not able to do so. (No longer smiling) I then decided that I could live with a less fancy report and wrote a second little script to read the .txt file (Output from the VBS script), and create a second .txt file that I enhanced to have a header, footer, and record count. The SchedLgU.Txt is a "wrap-around" file. It has an eyecatcher that indicates where the most recent log record is located in the log file. I enhanced the second script to use this eyecatcher to build the output file (report) in a pure chronological order. I also added some white space to make the "job groups" easier to view. I then set up a new Scheduled Task to run these scripts at 9:00 PM every night and e-mail the "report" to me. This seems to be working nicely. The reason that I am writing this post is to see if anyone else has every experimented with the SchedLgU.txt file. I also thought that others may benefit from the experience that I have had the past couple of days. I have never run into a .txt file that I could not handle with Access. I am guessing that the SchedLgU.Txt has a number of embedded "Strange" characters that are causing problems. Why there was a difference in the results between accdb and accdr (Runtime) still remains a mystery. Brad