TECH TIP: Testing the ReportBuilder Services Auto-restart Feature

If the report server application encounters an unhandled exception then it does the following:

1. Writes the error to the log.
2. Notifies RB Services that it has encountered a fatal exception.
3. Halts execution.
4. RB Services then starts a new report server application process.

If you want to test this, try adding some event-handler code to one of your reports. In the Report.BeforePrint event add code to crash the server:

raise Exception.Create('Dummy Exception: Testing RB Services auto-restart');

You can test the above with the RBServer\Demos\Servers\Main project.

1. Open the project, compile and run. This will automatically register the application with RB Services.
2. Close the application
3. Modify one of the form based reports as described above. For my test I modified dm0001.pas.
4. Compile the project.
5. Use RB Services to run the report server application as a service.
6. Use Task Manager to find the RBServer.exe process
7. Run the demo client report explorer application and use it to access the server.
8. Select and run the report containing the event-handler that raises the exception.
9. Use the Task Manager to watch the RBServer.exe process terminate and then restart.
10. Select any of the other reports and they should run correctly.