Foreign Character Bug
Shared on the ACL User Forum in Spring 2007

Foreign Character Bug
Shared on the ACL User Forum in Spring 2007

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 I ran into a bug for the first time on Friday...   The bug deletes your entire project!  You can run ACL as usual and close it as normal, but when you re-open the project it gives you a message asking if you want to delete file.  Regardless of what you do, it deletes the file and everything.

I think I figured out the problem, but if you guys could get independent confirmation, that would be great! So here it is:

The project I was working on had a field that had an "invalid" character. The character  (that appears as a box in ACL) was showing up in the field JE_DESC. This didn't cause any problems with the code while I ran ACL.

I could use that field in computations without fear. In other words, the following works without problem:

DEFINE FIELD PWC_JE_Desc COMP JE_Desc

DEFINE FIELD PWC_JE_Desc COMP SPLIT(JE_desc," ",1)

But when I tried to fix the verify problem using the invalid character as part of a command, such as:

DEFINE FIELD PWC_JE_desc COMP

"P9 REBATES REC D IN P10" IF JE_desc= "P9 REBATES REC(foreign character)D IN P10"

JE_Desc

ACL continued to run and operate perfectly! You won't have any problems whatsoever.... that is until you shut the project down! Once you shut the project down, you've lost everything! It deletes all of your scripts and all of your files. The next time you log on, it will be an empty project.

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David Coderre indicated he figured out the following:

I also wrote a script that reads the corrupted project and gets the project layouts - if (and only if) when you get this message, you immediately stop everything; open My Computer and make a copy of the .AC file under a different name.  You have to do this before you hit Cancel or OK and while ACL is still open.  Otherwise the .ACL and .AC are overwritten and not recoverable.