Astea Mobile : Attachments are not open in Adobe Acrobat when it's uploaded by technicians

Hi Firdosh,

I understand they don’t open in the backend when uploaded from the mobile client.

Any error messages?

Is it possible they did not finish uploading?

What are the sizes of these PDF’s?

Firdosh,

I think that this is a bug.  Please create a ticket with Support to fix this.  There is also a new feature added in SU8 where an attachment generated from the mobile camera has been added to Alliance back end.

Hi Firdosh,
Are you able to open the .pdf file attachment directly on the server itself after the upload from mobile is complete?  (i.e. not trying to open it through the Alliance application?)  Does it throw any errors when you open it directly from there?
Can you also compare the file sizes on the server after it’s uploaded from mobile and after it’s uploaded from Alliance?  Are they the exact same size after each upload is complete?
Thanks,
Reid

Hello @Reid Gilbert,

I’m not able to open a .pdf file on server when it was uploaded from the Mobile device but same file we are able to open when it’s upload from Alliance.

I have compare the file size also and it’s same.

But this issue is not with all the technicians but with some technicians only. So they email the attachments to backoffice user and upload from Alliance. 

Hello @Phil Seifert ,

17. Any error messages? 
18. No error message on the screen.

17. Is it possible they did not finish uploading?
18.  May be possible, how we can prove that because we are not able to connect with Technicians on call.

17. What are the sizes of these PDF’s?
18. File size is between 5 MB to 20 MB.

Hi Firdosh,
Do you see any patterns amongst the ones that work and the ones that don’t?  i.e. Is it ONLY files greater than a certain size that are failing?  Or is it only happening for technicians running on iOS or Android devices?

Are there any errors captured in the log files on the server?  (look around the timeframe that the attachment was uploaded to the server...see if there are any warnings or error messages captured in there).
Thanks,
Reid

 

Hi Firdosh,

I ran into a case today where a customer was using a database not defined supporting unicode.  The result of this is they were uploading attachments in this situation via the backend but were unable to open the documents from within Alliance.

The reason for the issue is there are two parts of the save attachments process:

1. The file is uploaded to the server.
2. The database has a record of the attachment inserted

If the database is non-unicode and the filename contained characters not in the the normal Western European character sets, it will be saved in part one with the original filename.  However, the database record transforms the non-unicode characters into similar Western European characters.

For example, if there was a string in the filename such as “błąd” (the two middle characters are Polish characters), it is transformed into “blad” when the information is saved to the database.

Then when Alliance tries to find the file, it cannot as the two strings do not match.  I know you said there were no error messages but perhaps this was not noticed, etc. This also may not be the situation you encounter but is only a thought.

Please check the following:

• Is the database unicode or non-unicode?
• If non-unicode, does the filename for the PDF contain non-Western European characters?
• If non-unicode, does the attachment record for the filename show a similar name as the actual file’s name but with the characters transformed?

If so, this would explain why the file would upload and that you can open the file from the server itself but not from Alliance as it tries to find it with a filter for the string which does not match.

This is just a thought on my side due to the case I worked on today where this scenario actually occurred.  If this is the same, the only solution is upload the file again as a new attachment but use standard Western European characters and delete the previous attachments.

If the database is unicode, this scenario will not happen (at least in version 15.4 but I can’t say what happens in v14.5 which your environment has deployed).

In your original case mentioned above, you stated the same files if uploaded within Alliance work fine but is it possible that the filenames and attachment record do not match the search filter string after uploading from Mobile?