Blank workbooks keep showing up.

[KaufmannC_Pasco]

Hello!

After having published my first insights awhile back (November 23). Over time these blank workbooks keep randomly showing up. Unsure of how they are being created. They show up at very odd dates and times on my profile and no one else uses or has access to the ones I create other then viewing the one published workbook.

When opening them, they load for a sec or two and then return me right back to the insights workbooks page I was just on. This is on Insights for ArcGIS Online. These do not seem to be happening in Insights for Enterprise 11.1 where I have another workbook published out.

Thank you very much for any help!

[AkshayHarshe]

@KaufmannC_Pasco Sorry to see you are facing this issue. Honestly, I haven't seen that before, that too in ArcGIS Online. unless some of our tests fail. I will take a look and investigate if there are any issues. 

By any chance do you remember when this started happening? (maybe look at the date created of the first one). Also, Are there any scheduled reports that are failing to refresh?

[KaufmannC_Pasco]

Hello and thank you for the reply Akshay!

I have not seen this in our Enterprise Portal but that workbook is not on a schedule yet.

I sadly do not remember exactly when they began and do not have the originals from the first month or two as I had deleted them thinking they were blanks being created by my GIS Lead while he tried to learn Insights. This would have been around Sep/Oct when I reported the scheduling reports bug from the Designer which you helped me with in Oct and has been patched.

Apart from that, the dates land all over the place, some on weekdays and some on the weekends, some the same day and others days apart. Is there a way to see if it fails to refresh? Currently my lead has a copy of the one Insights we have but I cannot access it in edit mode to see if its on a schedule and these blanks all say I created them. I just asked my lead to check his Insights home page to see if he has them but he is currently at the Dev Conference and may be some time until I get a reply.

Thank you very much!

Edit: He replied, only his 1 copy of my workbook is present so I am the only one with the issue between us.

[AkshayHarshe]

@KaufmannC_Pasco  Only shared reports can be scheduled to refresh and not the workbooks. You can find if you have scheduled reports by going to the reports tab on the home page and filtering on the scheduled page. Failed scheduled reports can leave behind a blank workbook as it creates a temp workbook to store new analysis until the update is successful.

If you are actively seeing blank workbooks appear in your workbook tab, you want to check the active scheduled reports (not paused). I recommend you open those reports and check if they have any errors e.g dataset no longer available or cards in an error state etc.  Then check the reports that were scheduled but are now paused in the same way.

Also, see if you have any past updates by clicking the schedule icon on the card and switching to past updates: (Note: This information is retained for a certain # of days)

Let me know what you find, as I can't think of anything else that might be causing this.

I remember working on the issue you are referring to and yes, the issue is patched and should not affect this one. You should not be able to edit some other user's workbooks.

[KaufmannC_Pasco]

When I switch to the reports tab under presentations, I only see my one scheduled report which is on an hourly update. May change this to daily in the future.

Looking at workbooks under analysis or just being on the home tab, I see all the blank ones.

Trying to access them loads a blank page for 1 sec and then returns me to the page I was just on. In the above image. Hitting information provides nothing except my name. and clicking import gives me the error I mention in my lost reply.

[AkshayHarshe]

Looking at workbooks under analysis or just being on the home tab, I see all the blank ones.

I am more interested in the Reports tab and the hourly scheduled report as that can be a potential cause.  As I mentioned earlier a failed/timed-out scheduled report can leave behind a blank workbook as it creates a temp workbook to store new analysis until the update is successful.

Can you answer a few of my questions:

1. Check if any past updates are failing on the scheduled report. (use the screenshot I shared in the last comment)
2. Can you open the report by clicking on the title and see if the report loads fine? (e.g are there any errors on any of the cards)
3. Do you have any scripts that are updating the FeatureLayer(s) that are used in the report that is scheduled to refresh? 
   • This can especially cause problems if you are overwriting any feature layers.

Let me know.

[KaufmannC_Pasco]

Absolutely,

1. Past updates only go back 30 hours (scheduled for hourly reports) of which none have failed so far.

2. There are no blank reports in the report tab. These blanks only exist on the workbooks and home tabs.

3. Nope, everything is through a survey123 we update throughout the day or at the end of the day.

[AkshayHarshe]

Yes, it only stores past 30 runs. 

There are no blank reports in the report tab. These blanks only exist on the workbooks and home tabs.

Yes, I know. There will never be multiple reports created in that tab. Think of the Report as a workbook with just a single page. If it fails in the update process, it will leave a workbook in the workbook tab, not a report. In Question 2, I ask you to open the report and check if any of your analysis has errors and not just the reports tab.

everything is through a survey123 we update throughout the day or at the end of the day.

Update how? Is it just the FS is being edited? (Which should be fine). If hourly updates are not needed then, I will have you try a daily schedule to see if the problem goes away. 

Alternatively, try manually updating the same report using the workbook you used to create it or publish another report and schedule it and see if the problem goes away.

Unfortunately, I can't reproduce the problem until I can narrow down the issue. but I will check this on one of my environments.

[KaufmannC_Pasco]

Hello Akshay!

Sorry about the delay to my reply. I wanted to wait over the weekend to see if it would happen again to verify if it was the failed schedule update and it turns out that's exactly what's doing it.

I had 2 failures over the weekend. One on Friday at 5pm and another on Sunday at 3pm. Both created a blank workbook I can't open or do anything with.

I have changed the schedule to by every half a day now. So we will see if it continues to fail. Not sure why it is either unless it hiccups on connections issues as no one is editing it on the weekend.

[AkshayHarshe]

This is interesting. There is no reason for an update to fail in ArcGIS Online unless that feature layer is somehow unavailable for the update. I will try to reproduce this in the dev environment to see if I can reproduce this.