There’s a fairly recent issue with PeopleSoft’s nVision where the process goes to a nondescript ‘Error’ state after about ten seconds of ‘Processing’.
The Process Monitor’s message log is not very helpful in this case (which it rarely is for delivered processes), returning only two log entries:
<TIME> Process Request shows status of 'INITIATED' or 'PROCESSING' but no longer running
<TIME> Successfully posted generated files to the report repositoryThis appeared first in one of our lower environments after we had applied a PeopleTools patch (from 8.56.09 to 8.56.23) in order to meet enterprise Java patch level requirements. However, I can’t be certain that the patch triggered this issue. The lack of logs leaves me with only strong conjecture at my disposal.
In my case, I noticed that some nVision layouts were running to ‘Success’ while others were trapped in Error hell.
The reason this issue affected only some layouts was that the nVision layouts in question were old… very old. They were authored in an Excel 97-2003 format, whereas our nVision server is using Excel 2016 64-bit. On-the-fly Excel compatibility can sometimes break nVision, so it is necessary to upgrade the affected layouts.
- Make a backup of your affected layout.
- Open your PeopleTools suite / Application Designer and go to nVision.
- Open your affected layout.
- Using Excel controls, save the layout as an Excel 2016 format .xlsx (or .xlsm if you have VBA macros embedded in your layout).
- Rename your newly saved layout extension from .xlsx/.xlsm to .xnv. Test and migrate.