PDS not returning RBS in Project Server 2003

[kevmcdonk]

I have now encountered this issue twice in the last couple of weeks and
it has caused a degradation in our application both times. We have an
ASP.Net application that wraps around Project Server to provide
additional functionality and we use the PDS to return data from Project
Server where possible.

We found recently that we were not able to return values from the RBS
that we have set up. It just returns:
<Reply><HRESULT>0</HRESULT><STATUS>0</STATUS><UserName>zzz_EPM_PDS</UserName></Reply>

with no values actually returned. The first time we fixed this, I
removed any occurences of & in the RBS name and description in the
Enterprise Global and this fixed the issue. This time I just altered
one value to remove the & and this has fixed it, even though we have
two other values in there still.

Has anyone encountered anything similar or had issues with putting
ampersands in the RBS? I know that the obvious answer is not to use
ampersand but we want to be sure that this is the issue as we have
ampersands in there currently and this is not having any effect.

Thanks,

Kevin McDonnell

 

[Gary L. Chefetz [MVP]]

Kevin:

The use of any character other than alpha, numeric and underscore can cause
this problem. Don't use them, unless you want to keep repeating this
experience. Dashes and ampersands seem to bring out the worst as they, like
commas, quotes, parenthesis, and brackets all can be misinterpreted in this
architecture as code snippets. Of course, dashes and ampersands are the
characters people most often want to use in their code structures.