ABCpdf DLL Version errors - what to do next?

Question

I am using Websupergoo's ABCpdf for ASP.NET and I am trying to generate PDF's in code. My issue is that when I test the code in my development environment everything works fine, but when I publish my code to our testing server it stops working. We have our production services on the same machine as our testing services but they are using different versions of ABCpdf so I am forced to fool around with the DLL versions until we can confirm that the newer version of the DLL works with the code. I've tried using 32 vs 64 bit DLL's for the production server so that there can be different versions at the same time - but no matter what I do the testing server stops generating the PDF's. To make matters worse the server isn't actually throwing an error either - so I have no way to determine the problem.

Please help!!

Answer 1

Could be a permissions issue. Security policies on production servers are typically more strict than on development systems and this often causes problems during deployment.

You could try logging in as Administrator and try running a minimal test application with the component to see if this is the case. If your code runs as a standalone application (exe), but doesn't as an ASP.NET app, it's likely you have have a permissions issue. ASP.NET normally runs under a restricted permissions account such as IUSR_MACHINENAME.

You can check which version of ABCpdf is being called with Doc.GetInfo(0, "ABCpdfVersion"). Also check the license has been installed correctly by calling XSettings.LicenseDescription from ASP.NET for the interactive user. You'll find more info here in the product documentation on manual installation...

With several versions of a DLL installed on a system it's possible the wrong one is being called, but then I'd normally expect to see some sort of error message or exception being thrown.

If you can't pin down exactly where the fault is, then use Process Monitor from SystemInternals. This'll let you see which files and registry keys are being accessed real-time. If you see an 'ACCESS DENIED' or 'FAILURE' on ABCpdf or IIS worker process then you should look into why these are occurring.