The Glade 4.0

My company has a report. It creates a .csv file with all kinds of data in it. The first cell contains a hyperlink to an Excel macro file we host from our website. The file is 1.71MB in size and is accessed by over 200 customers.

This one customer is somehow not getting the correct file version. They end up with a file like 1.4MB in size. I know that Excel relies on IE for the file transfer. The workstation doesn't have any proxy settings defined in IE (I verified through remote access on the workstation). I deleted out all local copies of the file from the workstation. If I go to IE, and enter the URL to the macro file, it pulls up so quickly I don't see a file transfer window. I then do a Save As and it's this same 1.4MB version coming from somewhere.

The customer's database server (the one that produces the original .csv data file) is able to pull down the correct version of the file. All our other customers have no problem. This screams to me they have a problem at the workstation level, but I cannot figure out what. A tracert from the server and from the workstation show them going through the same hops to reach our website.

One of their desktop people sent this but it doesn't seem relevant at all. The file isn't executed from our server. It's downloaded to the workstation and executed locally. So I'm not sure what they did to get this output from whatever utility.


I'm completely out of ideas on this one. I don't see how this can be our problem because I'd have at least 50 other people screaming about something being broke like every time we did actually break something. Anybody got anything?

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The Dude abides.

is the customer directed through something like a Bluecoat server that would cache previous versions of the file?

Are they seeing a security issue that excel is stripping out the macros?

They keep saying they don't have anything that would cache this file. I wish there was a way for me to tell where the file originated from when they attempt to download it.

I haven't seen Excel strip out macros without giving some kind of message stating that security settings won't allow executing them. What do you mean by that?

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The Dude abides.

Office has 3 levels of security. Allow, Prompt and deny. is it possibly just running it in deny mode? donno which version of Excel you're looking at.

No - that's not it. I've emailed her the correct macro file and it runs no problem that way. This is specifically an issue with retrieving it over the web.

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The Dude abides.

IE Security settings? Domain policy? I guess I'm still not totally sure I have a clear picture of what the symptoms are.

I'd say there's a 99% chance that somewhere along the IE chain, *something* is caching that file. It's hard to prove that conclusively without being able to run a packet capture on the workstation. That said, if you have remote access to it, try using telnet from the workstation to manually fetch the file from your webserver. If that works, then you definitely have a problem with IE.

Personally, I'd make doubly, triply sure that IE's cache was completely obliterated on that machine. As in, going in with a command prompt and doing:

del /f /s /q c:\Users\Bob\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Temporary Internet Files\Content.IE5\

(or whatever the path may be for the workstation's version of Windows)

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

Had a prob like that once....it was an IE8 thing. Don't remember the fix but the workaround was to use a different browser.

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"Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own." Jesus of Nazareth

I recommend amputation.

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Darksiege
Traveller, Calé, Whisperer
Lead me not into temptation; for I know a shortcut

Finally got closure to this. I did numerous things to demonstrate it wasn't our problem. At Lenas' advice, I asked our web admin to set a cache expiration on this file to 1 hour which would force them to re-download the file. That worked and I used a couple other things to prove to them it wasn't their issue.

When their Corporate IT finally does e-mail their firewall team, they had it fixed within 2 hours. If only they had listened to me in the first place.

"Can't figure it out? Blame it on the vendor!" That seems to be a common motto these days. I'm convinced corporate IT is a receptacle for the buffoons of the tech industry.

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The Dude abides.

Screeling,

tell them to put &xyz=1 at the end of the URL (or ?xyz=1 if there aren't any other parameters). This prevents caching since the URL is unique.

For example: viewtopic.php?f=5&t=4144&xyz=1

edit:

Putting a timestamp (probably a hash of the time stamp is best) in place of "1" in the URL guarantees that the cache is never used.

Problem's already solved, Lex :p

Screeling's company could still put a hashed timestamp into the URL of the document to prevent future caching.

It's still unnecessary. The server is already being told through the .htaccess (err, web.config?) that it has to serve a fresh copy every hour.

Well, it's every 30 days now that these yahoos got their crap together.

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The Dude abides.