Screen blinks with data loss

Question

We have Navision 5.0 clients with a 4.3 backend running on a SQL Server 2005 blade server. At random times the users complain that the screen blinks and that they may lose data. I actually witnessed it at a user's machine this morning, and later she noticed that some of her address lines were missing from the Purchase Order Header.

I thought changes were written immediately to the database. This suggests that there is a cache or buffer involved. I found reference to CommitCache but not of the references actually explained how to check if it is turned on, or where to look or even if it is available on SQL Server.

IT created a system monitoring log, to see if we were generating any errors when someone would experience a blink, but nothing shows up on any of the machines on the network.

We have tried contacting our Partner with no response after 4 days. Does anyone have any ideas on what I should look at? This is reported to have been going on since the upgrade from 4.0 to our existing version.

Answer 1

Firstly, CommitCache is only applicable when using native Navision databases (e.g. *.fdb files). It doesn't apply when using SQL Server.

If a user has created a Purchase Order Line and committed it by moving to the next line, etc. then the line should be committed to the database. I can't imagine a situation where lines could be committed, yet, not.

One potential issue could be as follows:

1. The user has a filter set on Purchase Order Lines on, for example, "G/L Account No." set to 6600
2. The user enters a new line with the "G/L Account No." set to 3300
3. When the user "commits" the line by pressing enter / moving down the line will sort of "flicker" for a second while it is committed and then hidden by the users filter

Remember, in our example, the user's filter had been set to only show lines where "G/L Account No." is 6600 but the user entered a line with the "G/L Account No." equal to 3300.

My first suggestion would be to clear the user's filters by either:

1. Clicking the Clear Filters button in the toolbar (between the Flow Filter and Show All buttons)
2. Highlight a value in the form being filtered, in your case a line in a Purchase Order, and press SHIFT + CTRL + F7

You may then need to close and re-open the form in question to allow the form to re-apply it's default filters (e.g. PO Number, etc.).

Let us know if that resolves the issue.