If you’ve got a Sybase database you’re hooking up to and Windows Vista or 7, there can be some weird errors that crop up with Infomaker. I recently came out victorious in a three-month battle with InfoMaker at the office. I got the following errors across multiple versions of the product.
- Unable to load Client Library Context
- Cannot find Client DLL’s
There were multiple wordings of the error but they all boil down to not being able to find the Open Client on your computer for some reason. I like how Sybase gives no help on the issue, when it’s simple to fix. Also a lot of people I talked to didn’t mention this so I think they just got lucky like I did on one of my work machines during the troubleshooting phase. Check the following things first, it will save you enormous headaches, trust me.
Environment Variables
I can confirm this was my entire problem, and found little to no mention of this online anywhere. You need to have a few environment variables in place. The biggest one is the PATH variable. It needs to have a link to the Infomaker path, as well as the Powerbuilder Path. There also needs to be a SYBASE System variable pointing to the Open Client you installed.
Windows 7 Instructions To Check Environment Variables
Step 1 – Click on the Start Button (or Windows Button) and right-click on “Computer” and select “Properties”.
Step 2 – On the left hand column of the screen there is a link that says “Advanced System Settings”. Click that.
Step 3 – Under the “Advanced Tab” which should be the one that displays by default in the “System Properties” window that just came up, click the “Environment Variables” button.
Step 4 – In the System Variables section look for the Path variable. It should have the following directory as part of its path. “C:\Program Files (x86)\Sybase\Shared\PowerBuilder”. Note that if you are using a 32 bit version of Windows the (x86) won’t be after Program Files.
Step 5 – Look for a “SYBASE” variable under the System Variables. If there isn’t one, click new. Give it the name “SYBASE” and put this in the Value field “C:\Sybase”. Note that adding this value into your PATH variable won’t do anything to resolve the problem no matter what some of the forums say. I think mine was never added correctly due to an unreported problem in the install process.
This seems to be a bug in how some versions of Open Client install on newer versions of Windows. It doesn’t always add the right environment variable and no amount of rebooting, reinstalling or running it from a different username will fix this. For me, once I added the variable it connected correctly to the database.
Other Notes
Here are a few things I noted in my documentation that may or may not be important. Some of this stuff I got from colleagues, other things are stuff I did to make it work. Keep in mind I am running an old version of Infomaker on Windows 7 64bit machines.
- Reboot after installing open client, even though it doesn’t ask you to. Confirmed this, sometimes it won’t connect and gives a weird error message if you don’t reboot. I think it has something to do with Infomaker being installed first and not leaving something in memory except on start-up.
- Check the sql.ini file under C:\Sybase\ini to make sure the databases you want to connect to are in here. This important if you’re using a generic open client download and not the one your database owner provides.
- Double check your profile settings. Infomaker, especially older versions do not have the most helpful of error messages so it’s sometimes vague as to what the problem is.
- Check the Install log in C:\Sybase and check to make sure it copied some DLL’s into your C:\Windows\System32 directory. One machine I had didn’t do this on one DLL. I just copied it from a working computer and the problem resolved itself.