I have a very strange issue with my application that is running in a captive account on the server and displays our company dashboard on a screen/PC in the main office.

First, the PC connects to the server via Terminal Services and runs in a Captive Account. The screen saver for the PC is disabled, and the dashboard and the PC run 24x7. Only the screen gets turned off (if the office staff remember!)

The application runs fine all through the day and keeps refreshing and generating its PDF of the screen without issue. Sometime over the evening, however, something strange happens and I cannot explain it. The visual element of the application (that is, the display to the screen) stops working. The application process is still running, and amazingly is still generating the PDF (correctly) of the screen that does not display anymore. The actual process is still running!

Have you ever heard of such an issue before as this application was fine when the charts were displayed using the standard Microsoft charting tools, but has started doing this since switching to Nevron Chart.

The application does nothing flash, all it does is retrieve the data from the SQL Server and then pump it into the data-charts. After a refresh it takes a screen capture and generates a PDF. All pretty simple and basic stuff.

I am confused as to why the display to the screen shuts down .... would the screen being turned off cause an issue? It never has in the past, but maybe now with Chart ??

Steve

Hi,

The reason I take a "screen capture" is because I have several charts on the one screen (each in its own control) along with grids and other formatted elements that I generate that are not Nevron elements. I need to grab an image of the entire screen as this is the entire Divisional Dashboard, and this is what the Directors or the company want emailed to them each day when they are out of the office. AN additional factor is that this code already pretty much existed for the previous (non Nevron) version, so there was no time factor or learning curve in delivery of this.

I just thought that this was a quick and sure way of grabbing a full image of what was on the screen - all charts, all text, all grids etc... and it works. It is just that the visual element (i.e. the Form displayed to the screen) disappears overnight. The strange this is that my "screen capture" is still running and still generating a PDF file with the graphs etc in it, even though there is no Form image actually displayed to the screen. The application is still seeing the form image somehow!!

I think you are probably right and it is something else causing an issue, I just find it odd that no errors are reported, there are no application events, nothing to indicate that anything untoward has happened. All that has happened is that the display to the screen is not there, the application has disappeared as a running application (in Task Manager), has disappeared from the Task Bar, but is still running as a Process (in the Processes list of Task Manager).

I have never seen anything like this before, so I am grasping at straws trying to track what is happening as there is absolutely nothing at all to help me.

I will let you know if I find anything - and if you think that  I can generate my full screen PDF in a better way please advise.

Thanks,
Steve

Hi Steve,
It's very very unlikely that the chart control can cause something like this. In any case if you suspect that it is the cause you can test whether inserting picture boxes instead of charts alleviates the issue. If so you can populate those picture boxes with off screen generated charts (like in the example above). Hope you find the reason for this problem...

Best Regards,
Nevron Support Team