A couple of strange TM1 bugs

[Harvey]

So I have come across two very annoying TM1 bugs in the past few days. Thought I'd share and see if anyone else has had the same experiences.

Problem 1

I'm not sure exactly what conditions cause this, but it seems TI processes with lots of parameters cause Action Buttons in TM1Web / Contributor to spaz out. Instead of running the process, I get a message "Process failed null".

These processes run fine from Perspectives, or when triggered manually, so it's something to do with passing parameters. I have had it happen when I have tried to map more than around 13 - 14 parameters to websheet cells, but it also seems to occur when there's just a large number of parameters, mapped to cells or not.

For instance, I have just had it happen with a process that has only 12 parameters, all set to blank in the action button, but if I hard code the parameter values, it's all good again. It's driving me mad! If anyone can advise what's going on, it would be much appreciated.

Problem 2

This issue is more serious. It seems if I run a TI process that calls many other TI processes (say, in a loop within the data tab), it will eventually crash the server. It also causes all kinds of strange problems on my laptop, like flickering screen, graphics card driver crashes, and even once I saw a blue screen of death!

The only thing I know about this process that might make it unique is that it calls some library functions I wrote that manipulate strings and return them in global variables. It also calls the EXPAND function within the loop.

If I disable these calls, it seems to remain more stable (and run significantly faster). It also seems to last longer if I disable Aero theme in Windows 7, but it still does crash eventually.

It's most likely some sort of memory leak issue based on the unpredictability of the symptoms, but why? Is it the global variables, passing and manipulating long (ish) strings, or looping within the Data tab ?

This is TM1 10.2, no patches or fixpacks installed.

Would appreciate any advice, or just sympathy and a shoulder to cry on... !

[declanr]

On the first one I have no idea.

But I seem to vaguely recall something similar to your second issue and assumed when I encountered it that I was getting a stack overflow style issue from recursively calling processes and passing global variables and/or parameters between them.
That was just an assumption however and since I had a workaround I didn't spend much time interrogating it.

[PavoGa]

This looks like I'm resurrecting a dead issue here, but ran smack into the first issue Harvey talked about. But this was the only thing I found in trying to find something about the problem I was having.

Had an action-button for a process that would not execute in TM1 Web. Trying to pass about 20 parameter values. Solution in this case was to just pass a couple of delimited strings and parse them inside the TI.

If anyone has anything better, would love to hear it.

[Wim Gielis]

Could it be some kind of string length that is exceeded, when concatenating parameter names and parameter values at runtime ?

[PavoGa]

Could it be some kind of string length that is exceeded, when concatenating parameter names and parameter values at runtime ?

I don't know. The sheet was trying to pass 20 parameters of which 19 were strings. None of which were very long. Works just fine in PAfE. But after publishing, clicking the action button resulted in an immediate "Process Failed." No server log entry.

Added two more parameters and passed the concatenated values to them (Total of four string parameters are now being passed and of those string values, there were two blocks of eight and I passed each block separately with "|" as the delimiter), then parsed into their respective variables inside the TI. So actually had two more parameters (did not delete the others, just did not pass anything to them) and slightly long total string length considering the delimiter. Worked fine after publish.

Would have thought since 2015, this might have been fixed, but I guess it is rare this pops up. Took a few searches before I found this thread and it is the only one directly addressing this particular issue. There may be others; found this one first.