Troubleshooting "General Error" when using Drill-Down Builder - Part 1

This article is part 1 of 2.

My good friend, MVP Mark Polino was recently working on a set of drill-downs to customer information in Microsoft Dynamics GP. The links worked perfectly from Microsoft Office Outlook and Microsoft Office Excel...until they stopped working suddenly, with the cryptic error "General Error". That's it! No other reference of any kind, no where to go from here.

Fortunately for him, there are some tricks of the trade -- tricks of the trade because these can only be found in the notes of some developer -- to produce a "better" error, and here are the steps:

1. Go to Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Dexterity - If it is a 64-bit environment, you will need to go to Program Files (x86).

2. Rename the Microsoft.Dynamics.GP.ProtocolHandler.exe.config file that is there.

3. Launch Microsoft Dynamics GP and your Excel report.

4. Try the Drill-Down again. It will most likely still error, just more descriptive.

As it turns out, the standard config file looks something like this:


Microsoft.Dynamics.GP.ProtocolHandler.exe.config standard file content



The new file, after launching Microsoft Dynamics GP and attempting to run the Excel report, looks something like this (note the extra keys):



Microsoft.Dynamics.GP.ProtocolHandler.exe.config with extra keys for logging and error handling

We still have not resolved the issue. In part 2 we will look into more details and finally see what the problem was with this error.

Until next post!

MG.-
Mariano Gomez, MVP
Maximum Global Business, LLC
http://www.maximumglobalbusiness.com/