Troubleshooting

Problems Exporting Reports to HTML

My reports having missing fields, incorrect calculated values, incorrectly formatted numbers, or all three problems.

You're likely to encounter problems exporting even moderately complex reports to HTML with RPT2HTML4.xsl. For example, rptInventoryByCategory.htm, which you create by exporting Chapter 16's rptInventoryByCategory report, is missing category names, has the wrong category percentage values, and the category total value has too many decimal places. Currency formatting is missing from all dollar values (see Figure 23.36).

Figure 23.36. Complex reports exported to XML don't format currency data correctly and have problems with calculated field values.

This report, for example, uses Jet's DLookup function to return the Category name value; Jet expressions don't work in Web reports. (In Access 2002, DLookup and other unsupported functions threw script errors.) You can create a modified version of the report that doesn't include problematic calculated text box values. However, the modified Web report's content is less valuable than the original.

Tip

When you design reports specifically for export to Web pages, export and test the report's .htm file repeatedly as you add controls. The simpler the expression you use to populate text box controls, the more likely your report page will open without an error.

Problems with Live Web Reports

Users receive "access denied" errors when they attempt to open a live Web report on our intranet.

If you specify integrated Windows security for the connection to the project's SQL Server database, which is the recommended choice, users must have an SQL Server login or be a member of a Windows NT/2000+ security group having an SQL Server login for the instance having the source database. You also must grant individual users or groups db_datareader permission for the database. It's also a good practice to specify a default database for users and groups; otherwise the default is master. Never grant ordinary users permissions on the master or any other system database.