Who is this article for?

Users who encounter the error in the desktop application.

ApplicationandDatabase server access are required to resolve the issue.

If you are using v5.4 (or earlier), you may find that exporting or checking out results in the following pair of error messages being displayed: "message: There was an error generating the XML document." and "message: '', hexadecimal value 0x0C, is an invalid character.". This article walks you through how to resolve the issue.

1. Issue
2. Solution

1. Issue

Early versions of the application were able to accept some non-printable characters into Rich Text Fields, usually added via copy and paste. Upon extract from the field, they cause the "hexadecimal value" error message to appear.

The application was updated to fix this problem, and the latest v5.4 and v6.0 releases will sanitise these characters on input. However, any data added in the old versions will still cause the errors to appear.

2. Solution

To resolve the issue, run the script attached to this article.

It will search through all text fields in the database (excluding the logs and FileStore) and remove the illegal character. It may take a long time to run, depending on the number of records and amount of rich text.

To run:

1. Stop the Retain Server service (if present).
2. Stop the Ideagen Internal Audit (Aura) robot service.
3. Stop the Pentana application pools.
4. Back up the Pentana database and verify.
5. Back up the Retain database and verify (if present).
6. Run the script.
   It should run without error.
7. Restart the Retain service (if present).
8. Restart the Pentana app pools.
9. Restart the Ideagen Internal Audit (Aura) robot service.
10. Verify the effect of the change in UAT.

Once verified, you can run the script in Production.