Digital-Clay Community Forum

This may have come up in the past but I do not see it in the forum so I will ask:

ON a particular user's computer, starting today, the user has not been able to generate document templates properly. He receives the attached error.

First check to see if a different template works. You should create a new blank simple template with nothing in it and test that using the same output format you used (MHTML/Word/etc).

If it works then that means it is something specific with the template and not with the computer. If it's the computer, we'll have to debug it further, if it's the template, attach the template here and I'll try to find what's wrong. (Often it has to do with badly formed URLs or missing pictures which Microsoft cannot convert).

Ok, after testing various templates and finding records with errors, it seems that there is an issue with the templates that are retrieving data from the notes field entitled "description." There is some type of character or data in certain records that triggers this error when the template tries to retrieve this field. When we go and erase what is in this notes box and redo it (trying to make sure there are no strange or hidden characters, though we are not exactly sure what to look for to eliminate), then the templates work. We have not been able to figure out what the problematic content is - in one case it seemed to be a trademark symbol but in other cases we do not identify any specific characters, yet somehow when we removed the content and retyped it, then the template worked.

Any idea what the issue is and how to prevent it?

Good job narrowing it down but if it has to do with the source content then that's where you have to focus. Looking at the template won't help.

Clay uses a Microsoft converter/API to convert the template to Word/Excel/MHTML so if Microsoft doesn't like a specific character then there is only so much we can do (remove it or convert it). First find exactly what character it is, perhaps it is a weird character that shouldn't be there in the first place. Or perhaps the character has to be converted/escaped into something Microsoft doesn't mind (either by you or by us, but first we need to know what it is).

Ok, after further testing problematic records, it seems that the problem is not with that notes field entitled "description" in many cases.

In multiple cases, we removed the image file associated with the record (logo) and the template worked properly. Sometimes replacing the image file also fixed the problem.
In other cases, the URL field caused the error. For example, for whatever reason when we replace this website https://quietlife.tech/ and this website https://www.inmcgroup.com/ with one like http://www.time.com the template worked properly. There are plenty of records in which there is a website https as opposed to http and the template works properly so we are not sure what the problem with these sites could be.

Any thoughts about this issue?

Good job, thank you for finding this. It turned out to be a Clay bug. Will be fixed next version.

Yay! That sounds good. Hopefully, this will take care of this issue.

In case it is of note, this error message when trying to output the template does not always occur for all users for a particular record. There are cases in which there is seemingly variation for users/computers. Hopefully, this whole issue can be resolved for the next version (hopefully to emerge shortly...) Thanks