Method Community

Around 10:30 EST on July 17, 2014, we started having an issue with Method reports.  Many of our reports stopped working at the same time.  These are custom reports from custom screens that have been running well for months and have not been changed recently.  I am trying to find out what the Method folks may have changed this morning that could have broken our reports.  

The same reports that fail have an error that says:  There was an unspecified error loading the report.   These same reports will run from the Report Designer, just not from Method CRM in the browser.  All reports that read the Company.CompanyType value will not run from Method.  I thought it might be a locked Company table so we got everyone (and MIE) out of QuickBooks but it didn't  change anything. I even remove all report references to Company.CompanyType but the reports preview in RD but can't be run from Method.  I just talked to a Method tech support person but they were not able to determine the problem or a solution.  I thought maybe it was a license count limit assuming running reports took up a license, but increasing the license count did not get reports running.  

I figured it out!!  Thankfully I am a DBA and knew where to look.  There must have been a SQL Server patch applied today in Methods DB that started strongly enforcing datatypes in SQL WHERE statements.  I had a X > 0 on a TEXT (varchar) column that started breaking the WHERE.  I checked the data types and found X was TEXT.  I changed X > 0 to X > '' and voila it works.