Excel node bug: execute failed invalid distance code

Dear KNIME community,

I’m writing to you because I’m getting an error when using the Excel Writer node. When I try to save my data in an Excel file I’m getting the next message: execute failed: invalid distance code.

I searched in the forum and I couldn’t find any solutions to this issue when it happens with an Excel node. This is the first time I have had this issue in this workflow, which I have been continuously developing over a year ago.

Kind regards,

Hi @Daniel_RodH,

huh, that is strange. We’d need some additional information to investigate:

  • Which KNIME Analytics Platform version are you using?

  • Could you send us the knime.log? Either by attaching the file <workspace-dir>/.metadata/knime/knime.log or by copy-pasting the log from ViewOpen KNIME Log

  • Even better would be (an isolated portion of) the failing workflow, if that is possible. If the workflow contains sensitive data, maybe you could use dummy data, e.g. from the Data Generator). Please make sure the data is included (best within the workflow folder under knime://knime.workflow/data) or appended separately, however.

Best,
Lukas

4 Likes

Hi @LukasS ,

i have the same problem in one of my workflows.
I use Version KNIME 4.5.1

Please see the attached .txt document with the KNIME Log. I had to cut this log a litte due to the 4MB upload restriction, sorry for that.
KNIME_Log.txt (98.2 KB)

What me suprises me a lot is the fact that some of the Excel reader nodes are working and on one i have this error.

Hi @M_Kemmerer and welcome to the community!

Thank you very much for sharing the logs, the last essential part is just perfect.

It sounds like this error comes from a corrupted Excel file, somehow somewhere it can’t parse the zip-compressed filestream - the file seems to either be corrupted or KNIME thinks it is corrupted for some reason. I have more questions :wink:

  • Does the “corrupted” file open with excel as expected?
  • Do you have such a file without confidential data you maybe could share? This way we could reproduce the issue on our side and investigate.
  • Do you recall how you created the “corrupted” files, was that with KNIME as well? Maybe there goes something wrong in the Excel Writer, since @Daniel_RodH had problems there.

Kind regards, Lukas

Hi @LukasS ,

thanks for your replay.
Let me answer your questions:

  • In Excel i can open the file without any problems, so nothing unexpacted here
  • honestly no in this file i´ve a lot of confidential data because i´m analyizing them via KNIME
  • The “corrupted” file was initially create via KNIME and afterwards duplicated to seperate the actual situation and the history version

Thank you in advance, Marc

Hi Marc, thanks for the answers. I see, I already feared the data is too confidential :wink:

If possible, could you reach out to our commercial support@knime.com and attach a “corrupted” file (or workflow to create one) there?

If that’s not possible and since the file can be opened in Excel, could you share a dummyfied “corrupted” file? Maybe even deleting (most of) the data still leads to the same behavior, I suspect the error lies not with the data but the accompanying metadata. Unfortunately, there is nothing much I can do without such a file (or better: a workflow that creates one), since nobody on our team has seen this error before.

I’m sorry for the inconvenience!
Kind regards,
Lukas

1 Like

Hi Marc,

one more thing that came to my mind: do you need to have the file as an Excel file? If you will only use it with KNIME, I can recommend the table format with the Table Reader and Writer - they are quite a bit faster for KINIME to handle and are less error prone. The drawback is of course that you can’t open it with Excel, so it might only be a workaround.

Cheers,
Lukas

1 Like

Could you elaborate on what this means. Did you do the copy/duplicate on your system or with the help of KNIME?

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