Bad Building Blocks – Error generating report in Management Reporter

As you may have noticed I have been doing a fair bit of work recently with Management Reporter and this has involved a number of upgrades from FRx which has meant I have used the Migration Wizard a number of times.

When I used it a few weeks ago (screenshots taken at the time but I haven’t had time to post it until now) everything went well. I was able to view the report definitions and check that everything looked okay. However, I ran into a problem when it came to generating a report. Any report. I received the following message:

Management Reporter – Bad or missing data was encountered while loading the report and its building blocks. Report generation has been cancelled.

I checked the Windows Event Viewer and it has recorded the error as well, but the error message wasn’t that useful.

I selected one report as my test bed and checked everything over thoroughly looking for where the problem was thinking that the cause was something in the migration. Eventually, I fixed the problem.

How? Simply by restarting both of the Management Reporter processes. Other than the error when trying to run a report, there were no signs that there had been an issue with the services (they’d both reported starting okay), but there was obviously something wrong which was resolved by a restart.