Note: Reporting Dashboards for Parallel Upgrades between 17 and 18

[Marcus_Christi2]

An issue was recently identified that was completely unexpected. I thought to share it here.

The Problem

V18 changed for Reporting Dashboards to require an ADO.NET datasource be created on the application server, then set in Config under Utils --> Reporting Dashboard Settings. However, other things apparently changed, because a V17 application server then started blowing up on Dashboards that had worked for over a year.

The Fix

Under Config --> Utils --> Reporting Dashboard Settings, setting this to be whatever your old OnBase datasource was, fixed the problem (even if it's not read only per se). So if your datasource name was "OBSERVER", that's what you'd set as the datasource name under Reporting Dashboard Settings.

For the V17 app server: It basically must match whatever the app server has for dmsdatasource. Even trying to create a separate datasource didn't make a difference.

For the V18 app server: You just need to create an ADO.NET datasource by the same name. If you're creating it to keep the same name anyway this isn't an issue, as you'd already have done it.

This doesn't explain why the V17 app server cared in the first place. But I figured to share this as Parallel Upgrades are getting more and more difficult with every version and these sorts of inexplicable dependencies.

[Todd_Bailey]

Marcus thank you for your post! The setting that you are referring to in Config is the Reporting Datasource. Prior to OnBase 18 it was an optional setting so that you could have Reporting Dashboards report against a reporting instance of your database. However, in OnBase 18 we now require you to configure that setting.

For the V17 App Server, you do not need to have the setting match the dmsdatasource, you just need to ensure that you have configured a matching ODBC connection on the machine that is running your App Server. That is because in OnBase 17 and prior, we are using ODBC connections and will automatically change the user executing the query to the Viewer account since by default it has read-only access. 

In V18, OnBase was changed to use ADO.NET connections, which means that you specify the user that is used to connect to the database and it can not be changed. Therefore, we now require you to set the Reporting Datasource with the knowledge that you should be using a database user that has read-only access. If we did not force this, then there would be no protections in the Custom SQL data provider type to prevent users from deleting records or dropping tables.  

I also should note that this setting was moved out of the app server's web.config file and into the database in OnBase 17. That would be the reason why you see it changing the behavior of all servers connecting to that database.

Thank you,

Todd Bailey

[Marcus_Christi2]

For the V17 App Server, you do not need to have the setting match the dmsdatasource, you just need to ensure that you have configured a matching ODBC connection on the machine that is running your App Server.

Negative. That's exactly what didn't work. Maybe it was supposed to, but 100% it didn't. That was the first thing I checked.

[Todd_Bailey]

Marcus, if it is not working as intended, please reach out to your first line of support so the correct information can be gathered and we can take the appropriate steps from there.

Thank you,

Todd Bailey