Thursday, April 2, 2009

Viewing Concurrent Requests' output on external viewer stopped working

In e-BS, you have the option to view Reports' output using an external viewer, depending on the output's format.
I got a call saying suddenly users could not view a few Excel Reports. A IE was spawn, but instead of displaying the output, it closed after a few moments.
Nothing was changed in Profile Values and Viewer Options, server side. The funny thing was that it was working for some of my colleagues. The only difference was that they had OS Windows XP SP2. Indeed, users facing the problem had SP3 installed. So, obviously, SP level was the cause.
Since I did not find anything relevant in Metalink, I realized it was one of those cases, where you have to face Microsoft's and Oracle's existential quests, which make our lives so much easier and simpler.
So, I wondered why someone should install a newer SP, according to Microsoft? To make your OS "safer", of course, among other things. After realizing this tremendous fact, I decided to check IE's Security Settings. Since we are facing a download problem, let's view the Downloads Section. "Automatic prompting for file downloads" is disabled?
That looked suspicious. In SP2 its default value is enabled.
So, I enable the option, and problem solved...

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