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, last month, I wrote a blog about how much I enjoyed my initial installation with Oracle’s Secure Enterprise Search that is now integrated into the Oracle PeopleSoft 9.2 applications. Surprisingly, I received a lot of email saying that I was not alone in my pain, and more surprisingly, folks were having a lot more problems with it then I did. Heck mine worked with only a day of fooling around with it.

Here is a some of the information I put together:

1. Watch the certification levels and the versions delivered by default. For some reason and I just checked this on edelivery the O-SES that is available for download in the Application Media Packs for HR is version 11.1.2.2.0 which is NOT certified on Windows 2008 R2 or Windows 2012, Solaris 11, RHEL 6.x. Version 11.2.2.2.0 is certified on Windows 2008 R2, Solaris 11 and RHEL 6.x. However, at this time there is NO certified version for Windows 2012. —It should be noted that I have installed and configured 11.1.2.2.0 on Windows 2012 and it worked fine for the Portal Registry Search.

2. Integration Broker is HEAVILY used with O-SES.
– Make sure that your IB configuration is setup and working correctly.
– Make sure that you have the nodes setup with password authentication.
– Make sure the Domain Connection Password (8.53) is 8 characters long and is encrypted in the configuration file.
– Even if you don’t do SSL on the webserver, make sure you run the pskeymanager tool to set a non-default password on the keystore (pskey) on the webserver, and then add the password (encrypted with pscipher) to the integrationGateway.properties file for the PSIGW (PeopleSoft Integration Gateway) configuration.
– If you are using a secure gateway url, make sure the root and intermediate certificates for the keychain are in the digital certificates configuration.
– Make sure all the Service Operations associated with Service: ADMINSERVICE, ORACLESEARCHSERVICE, PT_SES, PTFP_FEED, PTSF_SECURITY, PTSF_SES_FEED and PTSF_META_DATA are active and have a valid routing that is active, and make sure the routing makes sense.
– The Service Operation PTSF_SES_SCHEDULED_FEED has two routings on it that I have seen. One is to the WSDL_NODE and the other is to the ATOM node. What I found was that the I had to inactivate the WSDL_NODE and make sure the ATOM routing was active. If you look in the integration broker monitor I had the FEED messages reporting as done, but if you look at the pub contract it was in error. Once I removed them and resubmitted the builds it generate the messages correctly and the contracts executed correctly and therefore started returning valid entries.

3. Make sure that you can do the 4 step test for the round trip. PeopleTools > Search Framework > Utilities > Diagnostics. If the first 2 steps fail there is most likely a problem with O-SES installation and configuration, if step 3 or 4 fail, there is most likely a problem with the Integration Broker setup for O-SES.

4. Test the search on the Search Test Page. PeopleTools > Search Framework > Utilities > Search Test Page. There is a button on this page to Clear Security Cache, and I found a couple of times that when I did the clear that searches began to work. I haven’t looked into the specifics of the cache it is clearing, but I just noted that this worked in a couple of cases.

5. Make sure the Security Permissions PTPT3100, PTPT3200, PTPT3300 are setup on your administrative user. I also made sure that the PTPT1000 list had permission to the searches that I had deployed under the new tab for permission lists: Search Groups.

6. Turning on the search dialogue box in the headers. First you need to turn this feature on, which is done on the Portal General Settings page: PeopleTools > Portal > General Settings.

6b. Search groups are not appearing in the search box. Make sure that the search index is added to the home page context. PeopleTools > Search Framework > Administration > View Search Contexts. For example if you want the Portal Registry to be in the search, you need to add PTPORTALREGISTRY to the Home Page Context Type.

7. Can Multiple Environments use the same O-SES database? Yes. The best example of this is on a development environment where you might have DEMO, DEV, TEST, QA all running. You can point all of them to use the same O-SES database.

Last week I was giving a demonstration on Enterprise Portal or as some like to call it the “Interaction Hub”, and as I was asking some questions about their existing architecture I found they had an odd issue.  In their demo environments the new Integration Broker Workcenter comes up without a problem, but in their existing production environments the workcenter page comes up but the left navigation collection pagelet renders with the following message:

This struck me as an odd error message, and after some google searches and a good look through MOS, I could not find anything that generated a solution to the problem.  I did find some notes where invalid XSL caused issues, and I found another issue where the temp directory was invalid on windows 2008 (make sure temp directory exists).

I had the client check to make sure that the production installation table was correct and that the license code was correct, and in both cases they were fine.  So this left me with no answer without digging in.  However, I was working on an upgrade for another client on the weekend and as I was doing the last touch ups on the system I found a DMS script that had the following statement in it:

This statement enables Navigation Collections and the Pagelet Wizard pagelets within an environment. Once this statement was ran, we had success.