Disappearing dashboards?

I keep getting reports from users that their dashboards are disappearing. Users who are reporting the disappearing dashboard were granted rights to the dashboard directly or via a group.

When they look at their set of dashboards and the available list under the Pre-Built tab list, it isn't listed. When I look at ReportGroup, the dashboard is listed, has an OPEN status, an access code of 'SECURE'.

If I assign myself to the group, I still can't see the dashboard in the Pre-Built tab list.

From the SQL server side I can update the ReportGroup record, set it to UNSECURE and it becomes visible again.

Has anyone else had this issue? We are still on 6.1 Build: 20121126

Also when I look in the Event table, the only thing I can find related are USERACCESS/DASHBOARD events with EventData of "message=Auto-Deleted Dashboard,webservices=true,dashboardid=[number]"

Hi Rob,

I haven't heard of this sort of issue with other clients and also, I searched through our Support Tasks and couldn't find any tasks which seemed related to this.

The only thing I can think of is that a while back there was an issue with dashboard tabs across client orgs, i.e. if you did one thing to a tab in one client org it flowed through to a different client org. Is it possible this is what you are experiencing? Do you use client orgs?

I'm wondering if you would be able to send across the full log file rather than just that extract as hopefully there might be some more clues in there.

Also, would there be any chance of either getting a backup of your Yellowfin configuration database, or if not that, then perhaps are you able to set us up with access to your Yellowfin instance via a browser?

Regards,
Dave

Hi Dave - we do use client orgs (we have 60+ of them). Our customers can only access their own client org though.

However, we (vendor employees) are at the Default Org level. I know that the customer having issues has secure groups, secure report categories, and secure dashboards. The users granted access would be selected users at the client org and some users at the vendor level. Could this mix of default and client org level users be causing the issue?

I'll contact our DBA and confirm your access to our database.

Rob

I had an issue that sounds just like this one. Secure dashboards were having the records from the table AccessLevel magically deleted. This caused the already granted users and groups no ability to see the DB tabs, as they no longer had rights to view and edit the dashboards.

We spent sometime error trapping and did find evidence of a bug that deleted these records for some unknown reason. I was told the fix is in 6.2 (Release 7/25/2013). But have not tested to verify.

I was able to manually add the records back into AccessLevel and regain access to the dashboards. Although each user had to manually re-add the tab back to their homepage.

Hi Rob/Howie,

That is correct, thanks to you and the painful logging process, we identified some bad code, which was fixed in 6.3, though was never implemented in 6.2.

As of the last release both 6.2 & 6.3 should no longer have this issue.

What essentially was happening, is that if the user list could not be obtained from the security tab (for whatever reason, ie. DB timeout) the access records would then remove , as it would think that no users were added.

We only had a few clients who seemed to have this issue, though it should no longer occur after the July release.

Apologies for the inconvenience this had caused, and please let us know if there was anything else you were after.

Regards,
David

hi David,

we are facing similar problems in 6.2 build ( 20130124 )
not sure what causes this periodically.

till we upgrade, what we can do to not accidentally trigger this bug ?

Thanks
Nitin

Hi Nitin,

There is not much you can do except keep all dashboards public and unsecure.
I would recommend upgrading when you get the chance as you're on a very old build and should no longer occur.

Sorry again for the inconvenience.

Regards,
David