Formula names that end with spaces

Thursday 4 June 2015 @ 9:23 pm

I have written before about using auto-complete when writing Crystal Reports formulas. I have actually written about it twice because I sometimes forget about my own previous posts).

During a recent remote consult I was writing a new formula.  I used auto-complete to insert an existing formula into the new one.  My instance of Crystal Reports immediately crashed.  I thought it was a fluke so I reopened Crystal and repeated the same steps. Crystal crashed a second time.

So I had the customer send me the report and I opened it on my own computer. I added the same formula using autocomplete and it didn’t crash, but I did get an error message saying “Invalid Argument”.  That happened every time I tried to add that field using auto-complete.  So I used the mouse to select the field and that worked fine. That is when I noticed that there was an extra space at the end of the formula name. I have seen one bug with spaces at the beginning of a formula name so I figured the space on the end might be causing the new problem.  I tried other formulas and found that auto-complete worked fine as long as there was no space on the end.  I guess in some environments that error can cause CR to completely crash.

I can think of no reason to intentionally end a formula name with a space. But when I am duplicating and renaming a series of formulas it is easy to leave a space at the end and not notice. And these spaces won’t be very obvious when you look at a list of formulas. So if you get one of these behaviors, this is one more thing to check.

(For examples of my most popular formulas, please visit the FORMULAS page on my website.)







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