My company is on the Multi-Tenant SaaS Cloud and so we’ve been preparing for this…
A word to the wise: Epicor 10.2.600 breaks custom AR Invoice forms created in SSRS; I re-implemented both the Report Data Definition and my custom SSRS form (a tweaked version of the standard Epicor form).
Some elements appear to be re-named and numerous elements were added; Epicor Support stated that fixes were impossible and practically speaking they were right.
For each step of the way, I opened current production & pilot side-by-side, replicating customizations made for 10.2.500.
By the way, as best I can recall no form changes were required from 10.2.300>10.2.400>10.2.500
Also, a previously generated Crystal Reports form continues to work just fine.
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Seems like these major updates always break the ar invoice, what a shame. Very unpleasant to fix as well
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Ours broke too 
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I’m an epicor newbie, I had tweaked the standard form for cosmetic reasons and added in the Primary Billing Contact for email now with 10.2.6 it’s broken. It was hard working getting it right the first time to recall how and do it again is most irritating.
Also a simple question but before the update I think the epicor version number was listed on the top right where do I find it now?
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Hi @Melmoy,
I’m not sure you truly count as a “newbie” if you’ve succeeded in adding billing contact data to the form. I commend you, as it wasn’t easy for me to do.
I don’t know anything about the Epicor version number being listed in the top right, so I can’t help there.
My company uses the Epicor Multi-Tenant SaaS cloud and here is what I did to get invoicing working again for my company:
- Opened the old Report Data Definition in Pilot; this continued to contain the old RDD and served as model.
- On a different screen, opened Report Data Definition in Production. I opened the standard Data Definition (“ARForm”) and made a copy; I appended “v2” to the end so I could tell the difference between old & new. Then I used the Pilot customizations as a model for Production.
- I opened Report Style Maintenance (Pilot & Production) and updated my custom style with the “v2” RDD. I then created a new Report Location on my PC and downloaded the standard ARForm files to it.
- I printed an invoice to with my custom RDD and the standard form; this ensured I hadn’t yet introduced any bugs.
- I opened the 2014 version of Microsoft SQL Server Report Builder (two instances) so I could again see old & new, then I started re-implementing elements in the new standard form. I started with the data elements and uploaded my custom RDLs at each step; an error would make the report non-executable.
It took several repetitions of step 5 to get things right, but eventually I did, and if you’ve done it once, you’ll be able to do it again!
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Can you tell me what changes in 10.2.600 broke your customization?
Specifically I want to know what kind of report changes are useful to communicate so you can upgrade your customization easier.
Maybe this is already documented and released somewhere lie EpicWeb and I just don’t know.
And/or maybe even knowing about the changes wouldn’t make a difference?
Not who you asked but in the past and almost every major upgrade, when the ar invoice form is changed by the upgrade, it puts the maximum sql allowed columns over the limit. The fix usually involves trying to remove unneeded columns from the definition and repointing the report to the new RDD, which is a giant pain for sure.
I would think additional columns added to the database, and therefore the base ARForm RDD would be marked as “Excluded” by default.
If required columns were added during new development we would run into the same issue so we would exclude columns prior to release.
Maybe I’m not understanding how the upgrade causes the sql column limit.
I was thinking the issue was more with the RDL trying to use fields that were removed or renamed. And also trying to reapply custom fields to a significantly changed new report layout.
EDIT: Meant RDL not RDD
My problems have always been at the RDD level, can’t really speak to it more than that. It’s been a couple years since I’ve had to suffer through it but the fix was like you said going through the RDD and excluding unneeded columns and hoping for the best
@Jonathan It looks like you removed a few fields from the RDD.
I had to remove the following fields and SQL from the SSRS Datasets.
CashHead IncomeTaxCode
CashDtl IncomeTaxCode
CustomerBillTo ARInvoiceAdjITCode
CustomerBillTo ARInvoiceITCode
CustomerBillTo CreditMemoITCode
CustomerBillTo MiscCashRecITCode
We are upgrading from 10.2.300 to 10.2.600
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Hi @Jonathan,
The mandate to switch to rewrite my AR Invoice from scratch came from Epicor Support; I presume you have access to support case CS0002011858 and can see the exchange there: “The custom ARForm will need to be rewritten for the new version, based on the new version’s Report Style and Report Data Definition.”
As for me, the error I received with the old form in System Monitor was a bunch of technical gibberish that surrounded the meat of the issue:
System.Exception: For more information about this error navigate to the report server on the local server machine, or enable remote errors
Until Epicor elects to make such errors accessible to its cloud customers, any claims of “cloud first” are only marketing fluff.
@PaulKile, rebuild from scratch with the new standard is their suggestion but doesn’t mean you can’t rescue your existing and tweak the RDD / RDL to uplift it up to 10.2.600 “new” standard. Watch the errors in System Monitor and tweak the RDD accordingly. Usually clues are in that “technical gibberish”
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Yep, but non-cloud users too. Best security practices keep your devs off your production servers so the event log or a server log on the server is a terrible place to log.
Search for logging in the Enhancement sections. There’s been several proposed.
Ours broke as well. This is the third time during an upgrade from what I understand of the history, (I’m a newbie but trying to save this form after being told by Epicor to rebuild it from scratch-which we did and that did not work either!) Epicor has broken this vital form. 2016, 2018, and now 2020. We are working with our partner to convert the form with a BAQ as the basis and get away from the RDD completely. We knew it broke on 4/21, tried Epicor and they would not help since there is some customization, and spent literally the last several weeks trying to rebuild and recover. We still do not have a working invoice while we are building the BAQ.
Having lived in the ERP space for over 20 years (different products) I know these things sometimes happen, however, I am so disappointed in Epicor at the moment. Fixing and building these things does not come for free. Obviously this is not a new problem for users. I have scoured these posts and tried every suggestion and nothing worked to recover it.
We are on MT, looking to move to the public cloud in the future, however, that is another thing I find frustrating are the limitations on cloud customers.
Disclaimer-my personal opinions, not necessarily representative of my company.
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In the end we didn’t have to rewrite the form completely. Although the same form was uploaded into both Production and Pilot the error message received was different, in Production the error was non specific
- Query execution failed for dataset 'ARForm
but in Pilot the error was
- Query execution failed for dataset ‘ARForm’. —> System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException: Invalid column name ‘Calc_MtExtPrice’. Invalid column name ‘ProbReasonCode’.
Removing those two fields from the query and re uploading it resulted in our form functioning again
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That’s exactly what it was for me to.
I got the non-specific error Query execution failed for dataset ‘ARForm’.
Looked in the log files for the specific reporting server instance and it shows more details about which field was failing
From there, I navigate to the actual RDL associated with the Report Styles that consume it, in my case a custom RDL called ARFormJRF and open with report builder. Modified the dataset for ARForm.
Open the query phrase and removed the two references to a field “Calc_MtExtPrice”, saved, and re-ran the report with success.
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It should be on the server where your reporting server lives and then just dig down to the appropriate instance of the reporting server and go to the log files.
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I ran into more AR Invoice forms on 10.2.600.5, needed to remove another column from the report query (T5.ProbReasonCode) as it was causing issues. The report prints fine now, for me. But, other users are reporting that they cannot print at all in that environment. Crazy times…
Does anyone know what might be the issue with why a print preview on my machine will pop up a PDF but the same print preview on a different machine never does?
Does anyone know what might be the issue with why a print preview on my machine will pop up a PDF but the same print preview on a different machine never does?
For the other users, is it getting stuck in Scheduled Tasks or is it showing as complete but not actually popping up? If the latter, are they able to click print preview from the System Monitor to retrieve the report?
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