Active Form error and/or crash in Excel

[sarahmilius]

I have a model where some cubes work fine with Active forms and other cubes cause either malformed/partial Active Forms or throw an Excel error about tm1api.dll which crashes Perspectives. I have tested whether it is certain dimensions, subsets, private, public, with data, without data, to no avail, with 32 bit Excel 2007 or 64 bit Excel 2003 on the same problem cubes.
would greatly appreciate any suggestions on what to try next. I at least want some idea of what to avoid if it is a design issue.

thanks as always

[Martin Ryan]

No idea. Sounds like something to raise with your Cognos rep. Even if the design is flawed the system still shouldn't cause an Excel crash when doing something it's designed to do.

Martin

[George Regateiro]

I would go with Martin on this one.

I have raised many questions about Active Forms to IBM. Though nice they seem to have a few kinks that still need to be worked out. I have learned to save often with them. Sometimes I can make a change and it crashes excel, then I will go back in and make the same exact change and it will work and we have just encountered some other issues with them that I am confirming as a bug with IBM before i post them out here (related to how the Active form is bringing back information).

[Jack Tuckerman]

I would also agree on this.

We've played around with Active Forms quite a lot over the last 3 months or so and found their behaviour to be eratic at best.

I don't know what version of TM1 you are using, but we experienced lots of problems with active forms where we'd use more than 1 dimension in the row calculations of an Active Form, resulting in the "malformed/partial" type scenario you described. However, the most recent release of TM1 (9.4.1?) and the FP1 resolved those issues we had with Active Forms which seem much more robust now.

[sarahmilius]

Thanks for the responses & confirmation of similar situations.
My recent experience occurred with version 9.4.1 on 32 bit laptop (windows XP/Excel 2007) and on 64 bit server (windows 2003/Excel 2003). Some info back from IBM indicates that the names of dimensions in the cube may play a role in the errors. Dimensions that share a common portion of the name (along the lines of SalesYear and OtherYear) may somehow cause confusion in translation. In one point of failure I had a cube with 2 dimension names that both ended with "working" (distinct from the "reporting" ones). I also suspect the hierarchy structure of one or both to be part of the issue, but cannot explain it in any logical fashion yet.