Hi, a few of our jobs have started failing with bizarre errors. Probably related to rebooting the VM after it ran out of memory.

I've recreated a test job for a particular issue I'm trying to diagnose:

There's a task to set a job variable:
The value is '{DATEFORMAT(dd)}'
Translate value to constant is on

When I run the task and look at the job variables:

Name: TestVar1
Variable: {JOB(Active|Variable|TestVar1)}
Value: '[* Argument is not valid' followed by a lot of internal code (Windows refuses to copy it)

Windows 8.1 Pro, VisualCron 9.8.5

  Screen Shot 2021-10-04 at 18.59.20.png (329kb) downloaded 22 time(s).  Screen Shot 2021-10-04 at 18.57.39.png (675kb) downloaded 20 time(s).

I am probably way off, but have you checked if the regional settings have changed on the server? It is the only reason I can think off why it won't accept 'dd' for days anymore. Do you get the same gibberish when you paste {DATEFORMAT(dd)} into the variables pop-up?

I am probably way off, but have you checked if the regional settings have changed on the server? It is the only reason I can think off why it won't accept 'dd' for days anymore. Do you get the same gibberish when you paste {DATEFORMAT(dd)} into the variables pop-up?

Good thought but the settings look OK. I tried the main Variables list, but it doesn't resolve in there?

Here's a similar corruption in some Flow settings   Screen Shot 2021-10-05 at 17.24.15.png (378kb) downloaded 23 time(s).

Seems there are some weird Unicode characters all over the place there. Maybe your xml files have been corrupted (settings files => job.xml and so on). Hopefully you take backups of these files to another server. I would try to import the backups and see if it fixes the problems. Alternatively, open the backup file and actual file in notepadd ++ and look for differences. Apart from that I have to defer to support I think 🙂

Seems there are some weird Unicode characters all over the place there. Maybe your xml files have been corrupted (settings files => job.xml and so on). Hopefully you take backups of these files to another server. I would try to import the backups and see if it fixes the problems. Alternatively, open the backup file and actual file in notepadd ++ and look for differences. Apart from that I have to defer to support I think :)

Good thought thanks.

I eyeballed jobs.xml and it looked OK. I ran an XML checker and there's a bunch of syntax errors but nothing which looks like corruption. I compared it with a backup from a week ago, and there's a lot of changes due to the timestamps etc. in there, but again no corruption from a quick look.

The actual jobs seem OK, the problem seems related to VisualCron talking to Windows.

A different example is a task with the Copy File command: last week copying a file to *.bak kept the original filename and changed the extension. This week it's producing return code 7777.

Have used the contact page for support now as well, hope they respond soon.

We've responded via email

---

I reinstalled VisualCron over the old installation (so my settings were preserved), and the job variables and flows are now fine.

(A job using WMIC is now failing, may or may not be related.)