SIMCA^®-online client crashes for a specific project configuration (Q883)

Symptoms:

The SIMCA^®-online client crashes when trying to open a variable plot in a particular project configuration, or when an administrator tries to edit a configuration. The problem is specific to one or more configurations.

Cause:

Starting with version 14, SIMCA^®-online and SIMCA^® use Unicode to store text data. This allows the software to handle non-ASCII characters which enables the use of non-English characters in the software (such as ú å ä ö — (em dash), Chinese and Japanese characters, and all other characters used in the world).

When a SIMCA^®-online 13.x server is upgraded to SIMCA^®-online 14 or later its database can be automatically migrated. The code for this fails to properly convert to Unicode in two cases resulting in the issues described:

1. Variable IDs in the SIMCA^® project.
2. Local path where the SIMCA^® project was located when it was uploaded to the SIMCA^®-online server.

Note this issue only occurs for a migrated database. It does not happen when a project (with or without non-ASCII characters is created in SIMCA^® 13 or 14) is uploaded to SIMCA^®-online 14 or later.

Workaround:

Since this issues is caused by incorrect conversion in the migration code, it can be fixed by re-uploading the project and re-configuring it in SIMCA^®-online 14 or later. This properly converts the project fixing the problem. Delete the old project from the server to not risk having further problems caused by it.