Monday, April 15, 2013

Blank page in Active Reports using flash viewer

I started using Active Reports for the first time and wanted to try out the various viewers.  After spending hours trying to figure out why the flash viewer was not showing anything but a blank page I started to be convinced that there was a problem with the plugin in my browser.

So, I downloaded a free swf video off the net and hard coded some HTML to display it on my page.  When that worked I returned to troubleshooting Active Reports itself.  Viewing the source for my page I found my hard coded flash code and compared with with the auto generated flash code from Active Reports.

Every help site I had been to said to put the Active Report swf files ( there are two of them ) into the root of your application, which is where mine were.  Looking at the HTML output however, I noticed that it was actually looking for them in the same folder that the page was being executed it; which was not the root of my site.  Moving the two swf files and related Theme folder into the correct sub-directory everything started to work.

Edit: I recently ran into a similar version of this problem.  I published a website after first deleting all the files in the destination directory.  When I ran the report using the HTML viewer I got the error "Failed to send request to ./ActiveReports.ReportService.asmx/RunReport - Internal Server Error".  One guy said a handler issue caused this problem for him.  In my case it was the actual .asmx file that was missing since it never actually got published.  As soon as I copied it into the destination directory things started working again.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I haven't been able to get this control to work in my app. Your suggestion works it's just that I'm using it in a masterpage/contentpage senerio in which I don't show them the report unitl after selection crtieria is chosen. Then I go get the data then popup (using a extender - AJAX) the report. Everytime it is blank. The control blanks out on every post back (or partial). And ComponentOne's support of their products is terrible. Their forum is terrible, after their latest forum change. And now all the history can't be found since they are bouncing you on all google searches to their latest version 8 page.

Jeremy said...

I don't think I fully understand the problem.
So you tried my suggestion on a stand alone report and it worked?
Then you tried putting that stand alone report into a popup page and it no longer works?
Did you make sure that copies of the .swf files and the .asmx file are in the new popup folder the report got moved to?

The report does have to be rebuilt every time the page is posted back, it doesn't save anything in the viewstate.

Jeremy said...

I got a new error for the same problem, I edited the post for it.