Smart Thinking Newsletter

Mobile ERP App Development Mistakes That Will Ruin Your Enterprise App

As if implementing an Enterprise Resource Planning system wasn’t difficult (or costly) enough, adding mobile capabilities can increase programming difficulty as well as introducing the risk of unexpected results. In order to ensure success, mobile ERP application have to take into account several factors, including customer preferences, operating system varieties, design, connectivity, etc. Creating a streamlined, efficient ERP mobile app may seem like a tough road, but in the end you’ll get a useful piece of technology that will increase your company’s interaction with customers and other users.

Okay, Oracle Secure Enterprise Search has a lot of moving parts when integrated with PeopleSoft. I have posted a couple of notes on it already but I just spent several hours troubleshoot O-SES where the diagnostics check would ping, deploy, crawl, and search, but it was not returning a search result. The logs showed that there was a routing issue, and the O-SES logs showed a couple of different errors, and when looking on my Oracle I found some solutions but after chasing my tail for several hours, I thought, maybe I should just go back to the beginning and double check my routings.

Sure enough I found one I missed. Make sure that all the routings under the services: ADMINSERVICE, ORACLESEARCHSERVICE, PT_SES, PTFP_FEED, PTSF_SECURITY, PTSF_SES_FEED, PTSF_META_DATA are active. I have attached a SQL script that you can run which shows many of the key elements that you are checking for.

SELECT A.IB_SERVICENAME, A.IB_OPERATIONNAME, A.DEFAULTVER, A.RTNGTYPE, B.PARAMETERNAME, B.MSGNAME, C.ACTIVE_FLAG,
(SELECT COUNT(*) FROM PSAUTHWS S1 WHERE S1.IB_OPERATIONNAME = A.IB_OPERATIONNAME) AS “PERMISSION COUNT”,
B.QUEUENAME, D.ROUTINGDEFNNAME, D.SENDERNODENAME, D.RECEIVERNODENAME, D.EFF_STATUS AS “ROUTE STATUS”,
E.PARAMETERNAME, E.INMSGNAME, E.INMSGVERSION, E.XFRMNAME , E.OUTMSGNAME , E.OUTMSGVERSION , E.ALIASNAME
FROM PSOPERATION A, PSOPRVERDFNPARM B, PSOPRVERDFN C, PSIBRTNGDEFN D, PSRTNGDFNPARM E
WHERE A.IB_OPERATIONNAME = B.IB_OPERATIONNAME
AND A.DEFAULTVER = B.VERSIONNAME
AND A.IB_OPERATIONNAME = C.IB_OPERATIONNAME
AND A.DEFAULTVER = C.VERSIONNAME
AND A.IB_OPERATIONNAME = D.IB_OPERATIONNAME
AND A.DEFAULTVER = D.VERSIONNAME
AND D.ROUTINGDEFNNAME = E.ROUTINGDEFNNAME
AND A.IB_SERVICENAME IN (‘ADMINSERVICE’, ‘ORACLESEARCHSERVICE’, ‘PT_SES’, ‘PTFP_FEED’, ‘PTSF_SECURITY’, ‘PTSF_SES_FEED’, ‘PTSF_META_DATA’)
ORDER BY A.RTNGTYPE, C.ACTIVE_FLAG, D.EFF_STATUS, A.IB_OPERATIONNAME

When trying to get Oracle Secure Enterprise Search working on an environment there happens to be several places that call the search, one is on the classic menu which some people are still using. However, the search often will return an error using the O-SES.

An error has occurred while performing search, please contact your administrator.

In order to fix this you need to make a call to a different iscript: Navigate to PeopleTools -> Portal -> Structure and Content, select “Portal Objects”, then “Pagelets”, then “PeopleSoft Applications”. You should see a cref link for “Menu – Classic”, click on edit and change the iScript Parameter from ISCRIPT2 to ISCRIPT1. Save, Logout and try again! You might have to bounce the application server to make this fix work, but in the case I was working on, it worked without a bounce.

Well, I was just on Oracle Support and was downloading the new Finance Image 7 for 9.2 and it is now 9 separate files. This process is just going to grow more and more painful as time goes on, but it is what it is (for now).

So, I started to download each file and when I got to the 8 file, it will download no more. This is because the first download was complete and the other six was the maximum number of open connections allowed within the Firefox browser. However, a little searching revealed a quick fix to this maximum number of open connections per server:

Open up firefox – type about:config in the Firefox address bar
Look for: network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server
I changed mine from 6 to 10, and was able to download all the files for the Image 7 at the same time.!

Oh the little things that make life easier.

I have to say I have been using the PUM now for several upgrades and patch sets and everytime I get a new image I end up beating my head against the wall trying to figure out little issues.

A common problem, I have seen is the initial load of the PUM is fine and if you only use it once you might never see any issues, however, on subsequent loads if you did not install the network connections configuration right, you might be in for a wild ride.

Today, I ran into an image that another person installed and when starting up the database and listener would not start, which means the web and app are going to be down as well. However, this one was even more special because I got some really odd errors including this one:

ORA-00000: normal, successful completion

Now maybe, I am a little dense but this is an error message, so why is it saying normal and successful completion and it is an error message. I found a few suggestions on my handy dandy Google search that suggested to look at the ORACLE_HOME, ORACLE_SID and ORACLE_BASE variables as well as to double check the hosts file. Well, before I start anything I usually have my ORACLE variables well in hand, so I checked the hosts file and found that all the references I had to localhost were not resolving because there was no entry in the hosts file. That seemed to resolve the situation so that the database would actually start, but I was still having major headaches because everything was pointing to localhost and localhost.localdomain and there was just a ton of resolution problems.

I ended up change the tnsnames.ora file which for an image is under the /etc/tnsnames.ora location the one under $ORACLE_HOME/network/admin has no effect. Once I changed the tnsnames.ora file and the listener.ora file to the actual ip address, I also added a local_listener variable to the init{SID}.ora file for the environment. This solved the database issues, however, I had to also hard code the IP address for the JSL (Jolt) for the application server in order to get it to start, and for some final insult to injury, I ended up re-installing the PIA in order to fix all the invalid references.

For working with the PUM, all database functions are under the user: oracle, all PeopleSoft functions are under the user: psadm2.
Jolt Port is: 9000, webserver http is: 8000, default pia site is: ps, and if you need the IP address assigned to the Virtual box image, when you log in as root, type: ifconfig

Happy upgrading and patching.