I've made my mark

e-Record is a free tool offered by the Australian Tax Office (ATO) to help small businesses keep records needed for tax reporting. It uses FileNet Desktop eForms application (now belongs to IBM), and it is terribly out of date (just like Windows XP).

So what happens when you install it on Windows Vista or Windows 7? Well it kind of breaks. I ran into a problem while trying out e-Record 6.1 build 3 on Windows 7 Ultimate x86, and it can be reproduced like this: add a new business, and click through the initial steps.

What it’ll do is go through and start creating the forms based on a template, and it’ll keep going until a message box comes up and says “There is no current document. [5715, 0]”, with a single OK button. Click that and another message box will come up with a bit more detail, telling us that the error occurred at [line 6 of “EVENT_RecordNewBusinessDetails”]:

It doesn’t really make any sense, and that’s when ATO’s phone support really helped.

Solution

It turns out that this is a known issue from Vista onwards, and is related to a permissions problem. The fix is to replace all permissions of a folder object with allow full control to your user account.

To begin, let’s exit out of e-Record, and go to the Computer file system, and into C:\. There’ll be a folder named “Informed”.

If we right click on that folder, click on Properties, and go to the Security tab, we can see a list of security settings that have been applied to that folder. Click on the Advanced button, and then Edit (if Vista) and or Change Permissions (if Windows 7)

Untick the check box named Include inheritable permissions from this object’s parent, and when prompted to either add or remove the parent permissions, choose Remove.

Then, click the Add button to give it some custom permissions settings. If you know your computer account’s username, you can type it in and click OK. Otherwise, click Advanced then in the new windows, click Find Now. Afterwards, find and select your username in the list (the icon should be a single person) and then click OK, then OK again.

In the next window, we want to tick the Allow checkbox for the “Full control” permission. All the other check boxes below it will automatically be checked as well. Click OK to finish adding that permission, and then OK again to accept and apply those permissions to the object. At this stage, there should only be one permission entry for that folder.

Now, start up e-Record and try to add a new business again. If you didn’t close e-Record before, be sure to restart it before retrying.

Why does this work?

I have no idea. My assumption was that since my user account was a member of the Administrators group, and that the Administrators group had full control of this folder, it’d be the same. I’ve even checked the effective permissions for my user account on that folder object. It’s the same set (full control).

So why does it work when I removed all other permissions and replacing it with a full control for my user account only? I simply can’t explain.

Update 28 Jul 10: e-Record has been withdrawn and will no longer be available from July 2010.

Tags: problem