FRx Forecaster 7 , Roaming Profiles and Amazing Disappearing Database connections

This is a strange one and is not documented anywhere , in fact when we talked to Microsoft about this they had only seen it once before , so we thought it deserving of a blog post as this may save someone else a lot of time and effort.
This issue happens when you have Forecaster 7 installed in an environment using roaming profiles , in the case of our client they were also on terminal services but the same could be said for citrix.

The problem is, if you create connections to forecaster databases on a machine using roaming profiles, then when you log out and log back in to the machine they are gone and need to be recreated again.

The reason for this is that Forecaster 7 stores the connections on a user basis in an ini file by default in c:\Users\%username%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Forecaster\ . This as you can see from the file path, is the users local folder not their roaming profile folder. So when the user logs back on, because roaming profiles are used the system checks the roaming profile folder and low and behold the connection details are not there.
There is no official resolution for this from Microsoft. The only option would appear to be to update the roaming profile from the local one. Our clients IT team came up with their own resolution and have set at bat file to run on login copying the details from the local folder to the roaming profile.

So in summary this is a fairly unique set of circumstances and will not affect the majority of clients however if you are using roaming profiles with forecaster you will need to consider this. Our thanks to Daniel Merchant (IT at our client’s site) who pin pointed this issue.

If you have any questions please send them to helpdesk@touchstone.co.uk