Month: March 2021

I have a few clients with many company in Microsoft Dynamics GP (and one with well over 100) so doing upgrades or live to test backups can require a fair few, potentially time consuming, changes to data. I’ve posted scripts to update email addresses on test in bulk before as well as a few other variations. One recent one which has come up a couple of times, is the web services server location.

In the Workflow Setup window (Administration area page » Setup » System » Workflow Setup) is a field for the Web Services Server Location; this is the server where the web services have been installed and will be different for a standalone test server to live. Rather than have to move between several dozen companies changing this setting one at a time, the following script can be run to make the change in all companies.

The first highlighted section is the new server location and the second the current one:

/*
Created by Ian Grieve of azurecurve | Ramblings of an IT Professional (http://www.azurecurve.co.uk)
This code is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 Int).
*/
DECLARE @SQL NVARCHAR(MAX)
SET @SQL = STUFF((
					SELECT 
						CHAR(13) 
							+ 'UPDATE
								WF
							SET
								Web_Service_Server = ''test.example.co.uk''
							FROM
								' + INTERID + '.dbo.WF00100 AS WF
							WHERE
								Web_Service_Server = ''live.example.co.uk'''
					FROM
						DYNAMICS.dbo.SY01500
					FOR XML PATH(''), TYPE).value('.', 'NVARCHAR(MAX)'), 1, 1, '')

EXEC sys.sp_executesql @SQL

The second element is there to make sure the script is only run in companies in which the workflow setup has been completed.

There was a recent issue with the Report Writer reports printing a black box instead of an image. This problem was the result introduced by a Windows update and quickly acknowledged as an issue by Microsoft.

This is an example of how the standard report looks when the bug is present:

The Dynamics GP Support and Services Blog posted about the problem on the 12th March and have posted regular updates on the progress of the investigation.

The latest update on the 22nd was that a new update had been released which fixed the problem for legacy OS’s like Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 which follows current versions having working updates available from the 19th.

We’ve just upgraded another client to Microsoft Dynamics GP Fall 2020 Release; everything during the upgrade went smoothly until we came to upgrading the web services. The test environment was created by replicating the live servers into a sandbox environment.

I was pretty much expecting to encounter the problem we did as we were moving from using a SQL Server security store to an Active Directory security store. The error received was:

A loader exception has occurred.
Loader Errors:
- Microsoft.Dynamics.Security.InvalidSecurityContextException: Microsoft.Dynamics.Security.NonExistentSecurityObjectException : The security object does not exist.  Key = 25cc1a21-2cc4-4b13-a1c8-eea186fb688a
   at Microsoft.Dynamics.Security.ConcreteValidator.ValidateContext(SecurityContext context)
   at Microsoft.Dynamics.Security.SecurityService.Get(SecurityContext context, Key key)
   at Microsoft.Dynamics.Security.AzManTaskServiceImplementation.GetTask(SecurityContext context, TaskKey taskKey)
   at Microsoft.Dynamics.GP.GPSecurityMetadataSystemLoader.PersistTaskForAction(Action action, Task task, Keyword keyword)
   at Microsoft.Dynamics.GP.GPSecurityMetadataSystemLoader.PerformActionOnKeywords(Action action)
   at Microsoft.Dynamics.InstallData.Loader.Process(String[] args)

As the error referred to a security object error, my thinking immediately went to the new security store as being the issue. Due to the change in method I opted to remove the web services and do a reinstall; I tried using the built-in removal process in the Web Services Configuration Wizard, but this took a very long time to run and then crashed, so I used a couple of Microsoft supplied scripts to remove all of the web services objects from the company databases first and then from the system.

Once the web services had been completely removed, I re-ran the Configuration Wizard and deployed the web services again. The deployment ran through without any issues and we were able to test web services without encountering any further issues.

The lesson, which confirmed what I expected, is that if you change the security store type, you need to remove the web services from all companies and do a redeploy.