Metastorm 9 Reports: Unable to remove deleted Business Object Reference - Fix

Alex Fredricks

Problem:



Metastorm 9 only allows you to add one business object to a report at a time.  What happens if you add a second business object?  All the field references to your original business object get removed.

No problem, I can just delete and fix my field references and the Designer will auto cleanup and put everything back together. With that in mind, I went and deleted the 2nd business object from my data access view, made the fixes to my original fields, went to validate/deploy then....whoops!!!  Somewhere my report was still referencing the 2nd business object that I had deleted.

 

Error:

1. The deleted BO reference to List_Notes was still somewhere in the report. (image 1)
2. I double clicked the error to Go To component and all I got was an empty properties window (image 2)
3. Verified the business object List_Notes was not in my data viewer panel for the report (image 3)

3833201b-f2c0-4b94-9a52-449e446270f7image 1: Designer Error Message

4e7c9980-53a7-44a6-9061-ab18be3f7050image 2: List_Notes property window

6b36fe22-5657-49b4-90f4-fc6208548558image 3: Report Data Access panel

 

Solution:

1. Close your project if you have it open
2. Open the folder of your project in Windows explorer and find the report in question.  It will be a ".report" file (image 1)
3. Right click and open in notepad or Visual Studio
4. Find and remove the xml node that references the invalid business object (image 2)
5. Save and Close

06fa9dff-b3f3-4e4e-ad52-69332779f7f6image 1:  Report file

6d735859-c018-4e6f-b791-5ff74e9a31c3image 2:  Find the reference node

That's it.  Hope that helps.