Why the application desktop icons are not refreshed?

I found an issue with the desktop icons lately. The application we are using does not show the right icons after re-installation and icons shown in the previous version but the icon file is in the new version on the server. I googled and found the solution for this problem is to flush the Windows IconCache.db. I am using Windows 8 and will record the solution here as well.

1. Remove the IconCache.db file at C:\Users\Username\AppData\Local\ and restart
2. If not working, you can follow the steps below:

• Kill Explorer.exe process via the Task Manager.
• Open the command prompt window, type each of the following and after every command, hit the Enter button:

          cd /d %userprofile%\AppData\Local
          attrib –h IconCache.db
          del IconCache.db
          start explorer

• Your Windows Icon Cache would have been rebuilt.

Refer to the web page that I found this solution here.

Windows Update for KB3025390 causes (Selenium) automation testing to fail in IE

Our Selenium Java project stopped working in IE just before Christmas and it was very frustrating as we did not change anything in our code for a long while. It works in Chrome, however, IE is our main browser we use for automation testing. We are currently using IE 11 + Windows 8.1 for our testing.

The last time we ran our automation test was several months ago. So I tracked down the issue and found it was very clear that IE stopped understanding in any way how to find an element. As soon as reaching the code for finding an element either by id or name or xpath, etc., the element cannot be found and a NoSuchElement exception was thrown.

It is a special day today as we found the root cause of this problem (thank you my dear team mate). She found the issue is related to a Windows update. By chance, she has been using Selenium-Grid and running the automation test on another VM. She used yesterday and found it worked and then it stopped working today as the VM got updated via Windows update. She tracked down and found the problematic update is related to the Update for Microsoft Windows (KB3025390). 

So after uninstalling this Windows update, our automation test started working again. We then googled and found this update causes some other issues as well. 

Why all icon images are missing in Crystal Reports Web Viewer?

There is an issue happens to Crystal Reports Web Viewer very often. It is about the icons on the interface all disappeared at certain point of time. It does not affect the functionality of the buttons or viewing of the report contents. But it does not look professional for a business application.

We found there are several options can be used to solve this problem:

Option 1: add the site in the Compatibility View list in IE. This solution works when not only the icons are missing but also the report format looks wrong and different than designed.

Option 2: reinstall the Crystal Reports runtime. Usually, this happens when the .NET framework installed after the Crystal Reports runtime was installed. So we need to reinstall the Crystal Reports runtime again to ensure all related contents are in the correct place.

Option 3: an alternate way of Option 2 without reinstallation is to find the C:\inetpub\wwwroot\aspnet_client\system_web\ folder on the web application server. There will be several folders named after different versions of .NET framework e.g., 2_0_50727*, 4_0_30319*, etc.

As usually the highest .NET framework is used by the web application, open the lower version folder e.g., 2_0_50727* and there will be a folder called CrystalReportWebFormViewer4. In this folder, there would be all the images used on the Crystal Reports Web Viewer. You can copy the entire folder to the highest version numbered folder such as 4_0_30319* in our example. By saying so, you will still need to check which .NET framework your web application uses just in case and operate accordingly.

Specific server name used by sub-reports in Crystal Reports that running in a web application

We use .NET application and Crystal Reports plug-in to run Crystal Reports in the .NET web application. Recently, we discovered that one of the reports we built throws SQL column missing error while running in the web application. It is unusual as all our reports are built in the same way.

At the end, we figured out that it was due to the report uses sub-reports and all sub-reports require to be saved with . as the server name in the Crystal Reports file. So that when it runs from the web application, it would then work successfully. In addition, we found this is the only solution and it will fail even when replacing the . with localhost.

This is an unusual solution that we normally do not see. So I record this here for future references.

Crystal Reports do not export page headers in Microsoft Excel (Data Only) format

Recently, I found when using Crystal Report to output to Microsoft Excel (Data Only) format. The page headers are not exported in this format.

I have done some researches on the Internet and found the export of page headers to Microsoft Excel (Data Only) format is not supported.

I figured out that the only workaround to this (in my case) is to put all required page header content in report header. If they are required to be in multiple lines, we just need to create one report header for each line and put the related content in each report header. So the content will be displayed in multiple lines (rows) in the Microsoft Excel (Data Only) format.

Meanwhile, we need to make sure that the following two options are selected in Microsoft Excel (Data Only) Format Options in Crystal Report:

• Export page header and page footer
• Simplify page headers

This solution has fixed our internal reporting issue to Microsoft Excel (Date Only) format. Hope it will also benefit the others.

Click menu element in Selenium is not always reliable

Have just gone through an issue that similar as this one reported on stackoverflow http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21028145/selenium-doesnt-click-menu-element-even-though-its-there and it is about click a menu element in Selenium for automating the web application testing. The element is found as per debug shows, however, the click action was not performed on the actual element but the menu option above. Googled through many sites and found this issue seems related to IE web driver and particularly to the menu that structured to show sub menu by clicking the parent menu option (same in my case).

It is not a timing issue as the click action works fine in other browsers and there was no exception on cannot find the element. The click action was not correctly performed at first click but it seems working if to be clicked more than twice and usually, the third time works correctly. However, as for building the automation testing, this solution is not good. Unfortunately, IE is our major browser to test the application against and cannot move away. So at the end, I found a solution is to use Actions class that to manually move the cursor several pixels down in order to perform the click action correctly at the first attempt. The code would look like below:

actions.moveToElement(menuElement, 0, 20).click().perform();

In my case, I only had problem with one menu option. So for a quick solution, I hard-coded the name of the menu option to perform the above special click action. It worked for me although it is not perfect. I will continue looking for better solution to cope with issue or hope the next version of IE web driver would fix this.

Lesson learnt on nvarchar v.s SqlString

I had gone through an issue that related to nvarchar(max) data type. During resolving the issue, I had learnt below:

1. The maximum length we can specify in an nvarchar type is nvarchar(4000) whereas the maximum for varchar is varchar(8000)
2. As for nvarchar(max) the maximum data it can hold is 2GB chars.
3. In C# for managed stored procedure, if to specify nvarchar(max), we need to declare the SqlString as [SqlFacet(MaxSize = -1)]SqlString. If only use SqlString, it will automatically default to nvarchar(4000) instead.

It was tricky to figure this out but the resolution on the issue has benefited me to learn more.