We're investigating an intermittent issue with Payment Advice reports in IFS Cloud and I'm curious if anyone has seen similar behavior.
Most payment advices generate and email correctly, but occasionally a supplier receives a blank PDF.
What we're seeing
For a recent example
- The supplier received a blank Payment Advice PDF by email.
- When I locate the same payment advice in IFS and use Print Preview, the report renders correctly with all expected data.
- The XML dataset appears valid and populated.
- Other suppliers in the same payment run were unaffected.
Report Archive observations
In the Report Archive, I'm seeing two documents created for what appears to be the same payment advice.
The records have:
- Different Print Job IDs
- The same Result Key (1463084)
- The same PDF size (324,208 bytes)
This makes it look like the document was generated or requested twice.
The strange part
The email attachment received by the supplier is named:
Payment_Advice_1463085.pdf
However, Result Key 1463085 does not exist in the Report Archive.
The only archive entry I can find is:
Result Key 1463084
and that version renders correctly in IFS but never sends out an email.
Pattern noticed
Looking through several occurrences of this issue:
- The blank emailed document references an "odd" result key (for example 1463085, 1463087, etc.).
- Those result keys never appear in the Report Archive.
- The archive only contains the preceding "even" result key (1463084, 1463086, etc.).
- The archived version renders correctly.
- The emailed version is blank.
This almost looks as though a second result key is being created somewhere during distribution/email processing, but that result never survives long enough to be archived.
Questions
- Is it normal for Payment Advice processing to generate multiple print jobs or output records for a single remittance?
- Has anyone seen a scenario where the emailed attachment references a Result Key that does not exist in Report Archive?
- Could email distribution be generating a separate report instance from the archived version?
- Is there anywhere in IFS that tracks transient result keys or temporary output files that would not appear in Report Archive?
- Are there known issues where rendering succeeds for the archived output but fails for the email output?
At the moment it feels like:
- A valid report is generated and archived (1463084).
- A second output is somehow created (1463085).
- The second output is the one attached to the email.
- That second output is blank and is never retained in the archive.
Has anyone encountered something similar or can explain why I might be seeing duplicate print jobs and "missing" result keys?
This has been ongoing for years. IFS Global has tried to help with new font updates but no luck. I should also add, when the user opens the blank PDF from their email. The Adobe error is “Cannot extract the embedded font ‘Arial, Bold’. Some characters may not display or print correctly.”
I should also note, this same supplier emailed out a correct remittance today. So its not supplier specific.
We have multiple branches, and this happens randomly in all branches for 1-2 suppliers per every couple months.
Advice? Suggestions?
