OLEDB Crashed Blue Prism

[NickLeGuerrier]

Hello,

I have encountered some interesting behavior in Blue Prism today. We have a reconciliation process that connects to a spreadsheet using the OLEDB Blue Prism object and up until now the process of querying data has proven to be successful. However, when running the process in debug mode this morning, Blue Prism crashed unexpectedly with no exception messaging. I re-opened the application and the item is still locked in the queue, and there is no sign of anything going wrong in the log.

Has anyone encountered issues with OLEDB connectivity like this before? I imagine it may be related to opening and closing the OLEDB connection, but I am unsure.

Thank you,
Nick 

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Nick LeGuerrier
Senior RPA Developer
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[John__Carter]

Might be worth a look for clues in the windows event log and then raising a ticket with our support team.

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John Carter
Professional Services
Blue Prism
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[IanCampbell]

Hi Nick,

I would check the windows event log as suggested by John. If that shows nothing else then try with some dummy data incase its a formatting issue with the data (i.e. the data source has changed​ column/table names etc), if that seems to be similar to how it used to be then it would be worthwhile checking your latest windows security updates as there was a few in the November security release from Microsoft that caused serious issues with the Access database engines used by OLE DB. Microsoft have released patches to resolve these issues that will hopefully help with your connection issue.

See Microsoft Database Engine patch details: https://support.office.com/en-gb/article/access-error-query-is-corrupt-fad205a5-9fd4-49f1-be83-f21636caedec

Hope this helps,

Ian

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Ian Campbell
RPA Specialist
Allen & Overy
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[NickLeGuerrier]

Thank you to both John and Ian for these suggestions. I will speak to our IT team and hopefully this solves the issue.

Regards,
Nick

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Nick LeGuerrier
Senior RPA Developer
MD Financial Management
Ottawa
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[ca62013862]

I am also having this issue. It happens for me when opening a connection to an excel file with the wrong compatibility mode / excel version in the connection string's extended properties. Most commonly I get a crash if the version I specify doesn't match the excel sheet I'm trying to open

Provider=Microsoft.ACE.OLEDB.12.0;Data Source=spreadsheet.xlsx;Extended Properties='Excel 12.0 Xml;HDR=YES;Empty Text Mode=EmptyAsNull'; <-- This will work because the spreadsheet is xlsx and the version of the extended properties is "Excel 12.0 Xml" 

Provider=Microsoft.ACE.OLEDB.12.0;Data Source=spreadsheet.xls;Extended Properties='Excel 12.0 Xml;HDR=YES;Empty Text Mode=EmptyAsNull'; <-- This will crash because the spreadsheet is xls and the version of the extended properties is "Excel 12.0 Xml" Changing the version to "Excel 8.0" avoids the crash

Editing the object to check the file type before setting the connection string is how I handled the issue. But Blue Prism really shouldn't be crashing like this under any circumstance