081600

Cleaning Up After Reports When They Terminate Abnormally

(August 16, 2000)

Audience: All Skills Manager users.

A Skills Manager report is generated as a series of temporary meta files. Each page of a report is represented as an individual file with each file ranging in size from 5KB to 25KB, depending on the content of the page. The location of these temporary files will depend on the version of Windows you are using. Windows 95/98/ME stores temporary files in the "Windows\Temp" folder by default. Windows 2000/XP stores the files in the "Documents and Settings\UserName\Local Settings\Temp" folder by default, where Username is the actual user's name. Since Windows 2000/XP are multi-user operating systems it is possible for a single workstation to have several temporary folders, one for every user. The temporary files are named “CLA#####.TMP”, where the #’s are alpha-numeric characters that are randomly assigned to give each file a unique name.

Skills Manager begins constructing these temporary files when the Run Report button is pressed. All of the files are constructed by the time the report is displayed in the report viewer. You can observe the report files at this time using Windows Explorer to navigate to the temporary folder. A large report may consist of hundreds or thousands of pages that require many megabytes of memory. Skills Manager deletes these temporary files automatically either after the user exits report viewer without printing the report or when the user prints the report and printing reaches a normal completion. If the report is interrupted and does not reach a normal conclusion, such as when the user cancels the report using a means outside of the application, Skills Manager does not have an opportunity to remove the files.

When a report is terminated prematurely the report files remain in the temporary folder. This is undesirable because the memory consumed by the report files is wasted or unavailable to other programs until the files are deleted. A computer that runs low on disk storage can experience problems with other software applications or even the operating system.

The report files must be deleted manually. Files named "CLA#####.TMP" with a date older than the current date should be deleted. Do not assume that all of the files in the folder were created by Skills Manager. Many software applications place temporary files in the Temp folder. A user should check this folder periodically for the presence of old report files.

by Steve Wesner

Crown Pointe Technologies, Inc.