Word Template Debugging

Recently, I have been looking a lot of Word Template cases - I'm the primary Escalation Engineer on that feature.  Since Word Templates are new to GP 2010, I want to get some blog articles written on some of the common issues we are running into.  So this will probably be a series of Word Template posts. 

For the first post, I want to make sure everyone is aware of some logging capbability that we have with word templates.  The logging will come in handy if your problem has something to do with the Word Template not printing a document.  So for example, you are trying to print an invoice to a Word template and you receive an error message something along the lines of this:

"One or More templates could not be processed. View the exception log for more details." 

And the template won't print.  Or you could possibly get other scenarios as well.  Bottom line is that we have some logging that we can take advantage of to help us determine where the problem is.  There are two DEX.INI settings you can add and these settings will produce a few things. 

DEX.INI settings

KeepTemplateTempFiles=TRUE
TPELogging=TRUE

When you have these settings in your dex.ini, multiple files will be created in the %temp% folder:

1. Log file
         -TemplateProcessing129357796245864818.txt
    
2. The Document
         - Fabrikam, Inc. Invoice [-STDINV2322-]2011.02.23_16;07;27 ~1-1.docx
    
3. The Template
         -Template Invoice 1~1 1~1.docx

Since these are in your %temp% folder, you will want to sort by Date Modified and that should bring these files up to the top for you.  Once you have the files, then look at them.  If you open the TemplateProcessing.txt, what does it show?  Can you double click on the document itself to open it up?  How does it look?  Does the template look correct, is that the one you are expecting? 

Then we just go from there.  If you need to create a support case, the first thing the engineers should ask you, is for these three files along with the package file of the report.  We can easily import the package file and the template and try to reproduce your situation. 

Make sure your remove these settings from the DEX.INI when done so you don't fill up your temp directory. 

In the next posts we will analyze some specific issues. 

Dave Dusek

Comments

• Anonymous
  April 12, 2011
  Posting from Mark Polino at DynamicAccounting.net msdynamicsgp.blogspot.com/.../word-template-debugging-developing-for.html

• Anonymous
  February 01, 2012
  Will this type of logging capture an issue with a template not rendering to a screen but saving to a file correctly?

• Anonymous
  February 01, 2012
  Robyn,  From the cases I have seen in the past with the word template not opening to the screen, there is a registry issue for that user on that machine.  What has worked is logging into that machine as Administrator and then sending a word template to the screen - in most cases this will work.  Then log back out and back in as the original user and try it again.  There is some type of registry issue where logging in as Admin either creates a new key or does something to allow the user with problems to run the report.  

• Anonymous
  August 04, 2014
  Hi Dave, your post really helped me in getting word template which was somewhere in Microsoft Dynamics GP but was not accessible. I am stuck at another place and am not getting any help from forums. Will appreciate if you could help me. The link to post is here community.dynamics.com/.../136220.aspx

• Anonymous
  August 04, 2014
  Hi Haroon I suggest logging a support case if you are unable to get this working the way you want. Thanks David

• Anonymous
  November 24, 2015
  Dave does this still work in GP 2015 R2?  I have this set in my Dex.INI but get none of the files you mention.

• Anonymous
  December 08, 2015
  Hi Mike I believe the settings still work, the only thing I can think of is that the settings might be included in a user level dex.ini which is being read before the system level dex.ini. While the user is not logged in, check the syUserDexIniSettings (SY01405) table in the system database. David PS: GP Power Tools has these settings on its Dex.ini Settings window (http://WinthropDC.com/GPPT)