Windows update breaks Raiser’s Edge reports

Saturday 9 February 2019 @ 6:20 pm

I have several customers that use the donor tracking software Raiser’s Edge(RE) and pull data out of it with Crystal Reports. To run CR against RE data usually involves exporting the data to an MS Access (MDB) file and then reading that MDB with Crystal. The challenge is that Microsoft doesn’t really support the classic MDB format anymore.

This week I heard from several RE users that a recent Windows update has broken the process. They go to run the report and get an error that the file format is in an “unrecognizable database format”.

One customer was able to resolve the problem by changing the export from “Blackbaud Report Writer Database (MDB)” to “MS Access 2000 Database” but there is some concern about making this change. Some users have said that these exports work fine when you run a report from Crystal, but that these reports will not always run fine from within the RE application menu. Others have had success running reports from these exports in both environments. I haven’t found the specific difference but I suspect that it may have to do with the version of the ODBC driver being used.

I will post more information as it comes in.








One Response to 'Windows update breaks Raiser’s Edge reports'

  1. MHurwood - June 14th, 2019 at 2:13 am

    We’ve been suffering a similar problem with Windows 10 updates. Our product uses the Crystal Reports XI R2 (aka v11.5) RDC component, the last version of Crystal Reports that came with that module before they moved over to .NET and other newer technologies. Our installer uses the official Crystal Reports “Merge Module” so that all the appropriate run-time DLLs get installed and registered and so on so that we can call up a Crystal Report inside our Visual C++ MFC application.

    For the last few years, every now and then Windows 10 does an update that breaks everything. We have to get our users to run a “repair” in our installer, which basically copies the DLLs again and re-registers them.

    I don’t know exactly what it is that Microsoft is doing to break things, but I suspect they’re resetting something back to default values as some sort of pro-active, preemptive clean up; just a shame its stuffs all our users up!


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