It appears that the visual basic database is timing out?

[Anonymous]

First things first ... this is my first experience with this forum and I'm not a programmer but placed in a position to find out why things are not working correctly.  Our estimating department uses many VBA programs written for AutoCAD 2007 & 2008 Windows XP 32 bit.  We are currently running AutoCAD 2013 Windows 7 64 bit.  I was able to get all of their programs to work as they did in the older versions but have been having trouble with one in particular.  It appears that after initiating a VB program the user has only a short time to fill out a form that eventually saves information out to a text file to be used later.  The following is a list of observations I've uncovered:

1. Once the macro is loaded and running, you don’t have to add or make changes for the sake of this example.
2. Every once in a while hitting the Save Form Information button produces the expected results.  The form remains active and more information can be added though at some point hitting the button will cause the form to disappear.  That’s when it has crashed/timed-out and any information that was supposed to be saved was not.
3. On my station and several others any action to Save Form Information after exactly 300 seconds will crash yet on others it happens after 60 or even 180 seconds consistantly for each user.
4. One thing to note, if the Save Form Information is not clicked the program will appear 'not' to have failed for an undetermined length of time though it has, it just won’t disappear until you click Save.
5. Once it disappears I’ve found that it has not unloaded as it should have.
6. By re-initiating the macro it appears to actually unload it therefore clearing it from the loaded projects.  Then hitting the button on the toolbar again it reloads the project from the last valid save.

Does anybody have any ideas why this is occuring?  Also, as I stated before, I've been able to get all of the other programs to work.  That is actually untrue as this issue occurs with all of them though this program is the only one that people keep open long enough for the timeout to affect their progress.

Thanks in advance to anyone daring enough to look into this issue. 

[fenton_webb]

Probably what you are seeing is an out-of-com handshake time out issue, but I can't be sure. Can you send a video showing the issue please?

[tomhurns]

I was in a similar situation a while back, after struggling for a few weeks I ended up solving the issue by installing 32bit AutoCAD natively on 64bit Windows. Now everything runs exactly as it did on XP! I used the Longbow Converter solution to achieve it

[Anonymous]

Thanks for showing interest. The video I originally attached was quite boring as it is 5 minutes long but shows the procedure and the eventual problem. As I described, I can leave the form unattended but for the sake of the video I worked around making changes and switching tabs to show workflow. Every so often I hit the Save Form Information to show that it does in fact work (creates and updates a text file in the background) and that at a specific time; five minutes for me, that same action kills the form. If I continued to make changes or leave the form unattended it would appear fine but once the timeout period has been reached any attempt to Save Form Information will kill the form.

The original clip is quite large and too much for this email transfer so I tried again only recording the last few seconds then converted it to SWF for ease. There is very little mouse activity except for the clicking of the Save Form Information button though everything described above is valid.

Thanks again,

Jeff Parmann
Production Engineering Manager
Super Sky Products Enterprises, LLC
Ph: (262) 404-1245 Fax: (262) 242-7409

[fenton_webb]

Have you tried installing all of the latest sp's and hotfixes? We made some changes

About the Longbow tool, if it works, I'm all for it - but remember, Autodesk doesn't support it because it's not a tested environment.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the input. I have heard of Longbow earlier when I started trying to solve this problem as others have had interesting things to say. I looked a bit closer today and it sounds like it might be the answer. Does anyone know why I am seeing different results; i.e. timeout lengths, for the different computers? That part still confuses me seeing that all of the computers were purchased at the same time with the same requirements. I'll keep you informed.

[fenton_webb]

The varying length timeout is strange, i have to agree. By default, out-of-process COM timeouts usually occur after 10 minutes. The solution is to implement an IMessageFilter so as to keep the messages flowing, and thus refresh the timeout. Since 2013 sp1.1 we have implemented a universal message filter that should have handled stuff like this regarding 64bit out of proc VBA - have you installed the latest sp?