Andrew Karasev

FRx Database Level Repair Possibility and Overview

FRx was and still is very popular reporting platform for mid-market Corporate ERP applications, such as Microsoft Dynamics or former Great Plains, Axapta, Navision, Solomon.  Current version is 6.7 and each ERP flavor has its set of Service Packs to this release.

Dynamics GP for example has SP12, which is recommended for version 2010.  Of course the best strategy is always to have the ability to restore your corrupt databases from backup.  However some of us might be a bit unlucky and have to deal with direct data repair.  Let’s take a look at options and tools.  Before we continue we have to make it clear that it might be a bit too brave to do FRx tables cleanup if you are not really sure what it is, if you are new to FRx objects, such as Catalogs, Row Formats, Column Layouts, Reporting Trees.  If this is your case, we do recommend you to call professional consultant.  OK, for the rest of us, let’s now go to details section:

1. FRx Specification Set and its file.  Please launch FRx Report Designer.  Click on Company and read Specification Set name.  Then in menu click on Company and Specification Sets, pull the one you just recorded above – this is your metadata file, which stored such objects as Catalog, Row Format, Column Layout, Reporting Tree, Accounts Set, etc.  Make a copy of it and let’s try to get into it

2. Microsoft Access Database.  Yes, this is what it is.  Usually the name of the file is FRxrpts.f32.  You can open it in Microsoft Access, however the database itself is password protected.  Well, if you are thinking about yourself as being real world programmer – you probably don’t need any guidance on how to retrieve password.  If you are confused, there are shareware and free ware utilities on the software market that should be able to help you out

3. Deleting corrupt records.  Microsoft actually recommends frequent compacting of the FRx database.  We had several cases with our customers, when Catalog record in the user interface becomes a ghost with the name filled in by unusual characters.  And since that it is impossible to delete it from the list or remove it by compacting the metadata.  In this limbo situation the real help is actually deleting these ghost records directly via MS Access in Catalog table.  But before you do that, please be sure that you have backup of SysData folder, plus have all the users log off

4. Migration to Microsoft Management Reporter.  In 2010 Microsoft Business Solutions introduced the successor of the FRx and it is MMR.  In our opinion MMR is good step toward supporting such new technologies as web user interface, SQL Server hosted metadata.  From the standpoint of the end user both reporting applications are pretty similar and learning curve is probably minimal if any for your controller or accountants.  MMR offers migration wizard, where you are pointing out to Specification Set bearing file and it is converted to MMR SQL based format.  There are some known issues in migrating to Microsoft Management Reporter, however they are resolvable.  The unpleasant news is the scenario where your FRx metadata is corrupt and migration wizard stops at the point of reading broken table row.  The technique described above should help you resolve the issue

5. Consulting format.  FRx data repair issues are not something that you are facing on the daily basis.  This is why the consulting force is rather pursuing USA, Canada nationwide markets.  In our opinion there is no need for local visit onsite and the diagnosis and work itself could be done via remote support via web session and phone conference.  As the author, Andrew Karasev suggests, such web session technologies as Gotomeeting, WebEx, Skype should make the service available virtually worldwide

6. Please call us 1-866-304-3265, 1-269-605-4904 (for international customers, where our representative pick up the phone in St. Joseph, MI call center).  help@efaru.com  We have local presence in Chicagoland, Southern California, South West Michigan, Houston and Dallas areas of Texas. We serve customers USA, Canada, Mexico, Brazil nationwide and internationally via web sessions and phone conferences (Skype is welcomed). Our consultants speak English, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Chinese.  Our core expertise is in International Business

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