Saturday, August 1, 2009

Dynamics GP Window Is Not Visible or Is Hidden

Quick post to share a quirk that I ran into recently. Nothing complex, but it was annoying.

I had been using GP 10 on a remote Terminal Server, and had minimized the main GP 10 window before I disconnected my session. When I logged back into the server, GP would not maximize or resize--it just stayed in the task bar but would not display.

I thought it might be temporary, so I tried closing it, and then relaunching it, with no luck. Even logging out, and logging back in didn't work.

I knew there was a config file storing the window location, but it has been several years since I last had this issue.

The setting is in the Dex.ini file, which for GP 10 is now located in the Data subdirectory for GP.

If you search for the WindowPosX and WindowPosY values, you will want to set those to a reasonable positive values, like 100:

WindowPosX=100
WindowPosY=100

In my case, the values had both been changed to -32000 for some reason, which explains why I couldn't see GP!

Once I set them both to 100 and saved the Dex.ini, GP launched fine.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

This is also a problem for our users who use dual-screens and leave the window on the second monitor. When users connect using one monitor they cannot get the window up.

In GP 9, i just set the security on the .ini file to only administrators so that the initial window size was always set. However, in GP 10 you cannot do this because it causes multiple other problems.

I consider this a bug.

Steve Endow said...

Thanks for the info on the dual monitors on the tip on the GP 9 security workaround.

I agree with you, they need to add bounds checking on the X and Y values.

I would think that negative values should not exceed the height or width of the GP window, and positive values should not exceed the vertical or horizontal desktop resolution values.

Unknown said...

Do you know if this problem also occurs when using GP in a Citrix environment? For instance, if I logged in last and had GP on my second monitor and then another user logs in. Will they have problems accessing GP if they do not have a second monitor? Something like this seems to be happening.

Steve Endow said...

@Stef315: Yes, I would think that using GP on a shared server with a mix of dual monitors and single monitors would result in a window position being saved that could cause problems for the single monitor folks.

It may be possible for a VB Script to modify the position values in the ini file every time GP is launched so that it is always visible.