This chapter describes issues associated with Oracle Business Activity Monitoring. It includes the following topics:
This section describes general issue and workarounds. It includes the following topics:
Section 19.1.7, "Database Must Be Started Before Oracle BAM"
Section 19.1.8, "Batched Messages Lost on BPEL Server Restart"
Section 19.1.12, "Unable to Create or View Report With User With No Permissions on System Folder"
Section 19.1.13, "Opening Report on Two Systems Causes Language Mix"
Section 19.1.14, "Oracle BAM Event Engine Cannot Call WS-Security-Enabled Web Services"
Section 19.1.15, "Use Single Quotation Marks in ICommand Web Service Export Command"
Section 19.1.16, "Alert Fires Multiple Times Using COUNTDISTINCT Aggregate"
Section 19.1.17, "Select Higher Time Groupings in Crosstab Views"
Section 19.1.19, "Do Not Use Time Dimension For Drilling Down in a Collapsed List"
Section 19.1.20, "Active Now Fails To Drop Rows When the Time Window Advances"
Section 19.1.22, "Potential Issues with Oracle BAM Order Booking Sample Application"
Section 19.1.23, "SSL Connection to Oracle BAM Is Not Supported for Monitor Express"
Section 19.1.26, "Tabs Sometimes Missing in Oracle BAM Active Studio"
Section 19.1.27, "Input of Numbers Is Not Localized As Per Browser Locale"
Section 19.1.28, "Unique Constraint Error in Oracle Data Integrator After Moving a Data Object"
Platforms:
Microsoft Windows Intel x86-32:
Microsoft Windows XP Professional, Service Pack 2 or higher
Microsoft Windows Vista
Web Browsers:
Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.x
Microsoft Internet Explorer 8.x
Hardware:
1 CPU at 1.2 GHz or faster minimum (a faster processor may be necessary to view complex dashboards)
512 MB RAM minimum
5 MB of free disk space
Display:
Oracle BAM Active Studio requires 1024 x 768 minimum resolution
Oracle BAM Active Viewer requires 800 x 600 or higher resolution
Additional Requirements for Optional Excel View in Oracle BAM Active Viewer or Oracle BAM Active Studio:
The Oracle BAM Excel view type requires that Microsoft Excel version XP, 2003, or 2007 is installed on the client computer.
Notes:
If you are using the Microsoft Windows pop-up blocker, or any other tool that blocks pop-up browser windows, you must configure it to allow pop-up windows while using the Oracle BAM Web applications. Turn off pop-up blockers in Microsoft Internet Explorer for the URL on which the Oracle BAM Web applications are hosted.
The Microsoft Internet Explorer installation on client systems must be a standard version, and it must not include customizations such as add-in tool bars or hot bars for other Web sites.
The following are new Oracle BAM features in this release:
Date comparison enhancements for report filters:
Allows date-only comparisons in filters without considering the time stamp. At this time, you must specify Date and Time for a filter condition on a DateTime type field.
Provides System Date as the default date in report prompt on DateTime type.
Unsubscribe option added to Enterprise Message Sources configuration.
The Crosstab, Summary Crosstab, and SPC Charts are no longer in preview mode; they are fully supported features in Oracle BAM.
Support for HTTPS Web service invocations from Oracle BAM Alerts.
Tune the Web services batching parameters independently.
Performance improvements.
See the Oracle BAM page on the Oracle Technology Network Web site for additional information about this release:
Preview features are for evaluation only.
ICommand Web Service is a preview feature.
Saving reports in MHT format is a preview feature. Save Offline, e-mailing rendered reports, and e-mailing a report in Alerts save the report in the MHT format.
The following report views are preview versions: Columnar, Matrix, Excel, Column Group, and Row Group.
This version of Oracle BAM does not comply with accessibility standards provided in other Oracle products. Future versions plan to comply with these standards.
For a complete list of Oracle BAM upgrade issues, see the following sections:
Section 3.1.1, "Patches Required to Address Specific Upgrade and Compatibility Requirements", which includes information on an Oracle Database patch that is required before you perform an Oracle BAM schema upgrade.
Section 3.1.3, "Oracle BAM Upgrade Issues", which consolidates various known issues and workarounds when upgrading Oracle BAM to 11g.
Note that this upgrade is optional. It is not a required step for customers migrating from Oracle BAM 11gR1 PS1 to PS2.
Customers not upgrading from PS1 are not affected.
The existing FMW_HOME/AS11gR1SOA/bam/samples/bam/monitorexpress/README.txt file provides instructions on how to reinstall the Monitor Express samples.
Only customers in Oracle BAM 11gR1 PS1 that have manually ran the scripts as described in FMW_HOME/AS11gR1SOA/bam/samples/bam/monitorexpress/README.txt (samples are not installed by default during Oracle BAM installation) might want to upgrade those to fix minor user interface issues.
Oracle BAM applications are not functional if the database on which Oracle BAM depends is started few minutes later than Oracle BAM Server.
An Oracle BAM sensor action cannot be notified of BPEL events, and the messages sent to Oracle BAM from the BPEL server are only stored in memory; therefore, when the BPEL server restarts, all the messages still on the BPEL side are lost.
This behavior is by design, and there is no workaround.
Oracle BAM presents the following limitations because in this release Oracle BAM Web applications and Oracle BAM Server are only deployed in a single EAR, but are represented in Oracle Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control using two separate targets:
Along with two custom targets, Oracle BAM Server and Oracle BAM Web applications, The Oracle BAM application also appears as a generic J2EE application in the Application Deployments list in Oracle Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control navigation tree, and in the Farm home page. It is recommended that the user only use custom Oracle BAM targets (OracleBAMServer and OracleBAMWeb), the internal application target (oracle-bam) should not be used.
Additional information about the generic oracle-bam J2EE application target: The generic J2EE application target (oracle-bam) despite being an internal application, still appears under parent Application Deployments and not in the sub-folder Internal Applications of Application Deployments. Moving oracle-bam generic J2EE application target to Internal Applications folder has been deferred.
The Stop and Start commands in the Oracle BAM Server and Oracle BAM Web applications menus in Oracle Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control pages does not stop or start the corresponding target only, it stops the entire Oracle BAM application (Oracle BAM Server and Oracle BAM Web applications).
Viewing any J2EE metrics in the context of Oracle BAM Server or Oracle BAM Web applications actually presents the view for entire J2EE application. (From performance page and Oracle WebLogic Server page the user gets access to the J2EE application metric).
Oracle WebLogic Server (Managed Server) home page shows three deployed applications for each Oracle BAM install (two custom targets and one generic J2EE application target). Corresponding to each target there are few J2EE application metrics shown. Because J2EE metrics correspond to each deployment, the metrics values get repeated for all of the Oracle BAM targets. The workaround is displaying metric values only against one target and the other two showing n/a.
The MBean browser in Oracle Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control does not have any validation in place to check whether the entered value is correct or not.
When you see the Unable to extend tablespace error message, you can do the following:
Increase the tablespace size.
If you cleared a large amount of data from a data object, and expect the tablespace to have more data, you might still see this error. The table space release is not synchronous, and you must run command ALTER TABLE table_name SHRINK SPACE.
A user assigned to a non-Administrator role may be unable to create or view reports, but has the privileges to do so, and gets the following error:
DATAOBJECTPERMISSIONMISSINGEXCEPTION_ACTIVESTUDIO_REPORTEDITOR_EDITREPORT
Exception Message BAM-01257: Insufficient permission to perform the requested action.
This is due to the user not having at least Read permissions on the /System folder in Oracle BAM Architect.
The same user opening a report on two different computers with different language settings causes a language mix in the Oracle BAM user interface.
A single user should not log in simultaneously on different computers with two different language settings.
As part of an Oracle BAM alert action, Oracle BAM Event Engine can call external Web services. However, for secure Web services, Oracle BAM Event Engine supports calling only HTTP Basic authentication protected Web services. Configuring an alert action to call WS-Security enabled Web services is not supported.
The Web service alert action now supports a couple of basic OWSM security policies namely oracle/wss_http_token_client_policy and oracle/wss_username_token_client_policy. These policies could be used to invoke Web services which are protected by corresponding server side OWSM policies. By default, all secure Web service invocations (requiring user name and password to be passed) would use oracle/wss_http_token_client_policy which essentially makes client to go through BASIC HTTP authentication.
Using double quotation marks (") around the file value in ICommand export does not work.
Use single quotation marks (') instead of double quotation marks to specify the file value.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?><IstanteCommands><export name='/Samples/Film Sales' file='c:\do_with_data.xml' type="dataobject"/></IstanteCommands>
When operation COUNTDISTINCT-based aggregate is chosen in Group filters in data object and report based alerts, the user might see the alert firing multiple times, even if the alert criterion was satisfied only once in the data. This behavior is seen when bulk data object operations are performed. That is, if multiple rows are inserted, deleted, updated, or upserted in the data object at one time.
Grouping by Week in a Crosstab or Chart view could cause group values for Day of Month or Day of Week to be calculated incorrectly for weeks that include the end of one month and the beginning of another.
Include Day of Year in the grouping along with Day of Month or Day of Week.
When you must pass a date input through an Oracle BAM alert rule invocation to an Oracle Data Integrator scenario, it is recommended that you set up the Oracle Data Integrator scenario to use an alphanumeric type variable instead of date type. Using a date type variable may lead to a parse exception within the Oracle Data Integrator agent which results in a failure to invoke the scenario successfully.
When this alphanumeric type variable is used within the definition of the Oracle Data Integrator interface, use the TO_DATE function along with the format in which the date is expected. For example, with a project level variable named alphVariableName, the function usage would be:
TO_DATE('#alphVariableName','YYYY-MM-DD')
Within the Oracle BAM alert rule definition (for the Run an ODI scenario action), pass the date to be input in the same format.
Drilling down on a time or date dimension in a collapsed list view causes an exception. Use chart views only to drill down on time or date dimensions.
If a user designs a report view with a combination of Continuous Time Series on a datetime or timestamp type column, and configures a filter for that column using is within a time interval and enabling Active Now (this combination is also known as Absolute Active Now), at times, the report might not drop or add the rows as the time window advances. This is due to the time boundary mismatch between Absolute Active Now and Continuous Time Series.
Active Now time is based on seconds, and considers the report opening time as its starting point (for example, the report is opened at 10.30:15 AM), and the end point is relative to the starting point.
However, Continuous Time Series considers the upper boundary at the time unit level chosen by the user (for example, the report is configured to use minutes as the time unit, so the starting time is considered to be 10.30:00 AM).
This mismatch in time units causes the report to not add or drop rows until the row has been dropped or added in terms of seconds according to the Absolute Active Now time period.
When report is opened in sub-maximal sized Web browser window, a chart view area may display the message "The view area is too small to represent the current data." When the Web browser window is maximized, the message might not be replaced by the expected chart view.
To work around this issue, always launch Oracle BAM reports in maximized Web browser windows.
When the sample application archive (SOA_ORACLE_HOME/bam/samples/bam/order_booking/jdev_project/OrderBookingWithBAMSensors.zip) is opened in Oracle JDeveloper, it is possible that you may observe design-time issues, such as broken partnerlink associations or valid database connections that cannot connect to a target database when editing the database adapter, and so on.
It is also possible, that you may sometimes experience problems attempting to run tests using the Oracle Enterprise Manager test console after modifying and redeploying this application to the SOA server.
To avoid these issues, it is recommended that you download a more recent version of the sample application from the Oracle Technology Network Web site located at
http://www.oracle.com/technology/sample_code/products/bam
Oracle Enterprise Manager Test Console Issue
There is a known issue with Oracle Enterprise Manager test console when submitting a datetime type payload.
If a BPEL process requires a datetime type input argument in its payload, and this process is tested using Oracle Enterprise Manager test console, the console drops the time data provided and adds an offset to the date value provided.
For example, an input of 2001-01-01 08:00:00 AM is modified, and reaches the BPEL process as 2000-12-31-08:00. This modification happens when the input was provided using Tree View.
This issue is likely to impact attempts to test the BPEL and Oracle BAM integration, such as when testing the OrderBookingWithBAMSensors sample shipped with Oracle BAM.
It is recommended that you provide the input using XML View rather than Tree View, or enter the inputs in Tree View, then toggle to XML View, review the data, and then submit the test request from the XML View.
For your convenience, use the payload sample below to test the sample application. Copy this payload into the XML View in Oracle Enterprise Manager test console for the OrderBookingBAM BPEL process.
<soap:Envelope xmlns:soap="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/">
<soap:Body xmlns:ns1="http://www.globalcompany.com/ns/order">
<ns1:PurchaseOrder>
<ns1:CustID>10</ns1:CustID>
<ns1:ID>1</ns1:ID>
<ns1:ShipTo><ns1:Name/><ns1:Address/></ns1:ShipTo>
<ns1:BillTo><ns1:Name/><ns1:Address/></ns1:BillTo>
<ns1:UserContact><ns1:PhoneNumber/><ns1:EmailAddress/></ns1:UserContact>
<ns1:OrderItems/>
<ns1:SupplierInfo>
<ns1:SupplierPrice>10</ns1:SupplierPrice>
<ns1:SupplierName>SupplierABC</ns1:SupplierName>
</ns1:SupplierInfo>
<ns1:OrderInfo>
<ns1:OrderDate>2001-01-01T15:10:20.000-07:00</ns1:OrderDate>
<ns1:OrderPrice>25</ns1:OrderPrice>
<ns1:OrderStatus>open</ns1:OrderStatus>
<ns1:OrderComments/>
</ns1:OrderInfo>
</ns1:PurchaseOrder>
</soap:Body>
</soap:Envelope>
Deployment to Oracle BAM Monitor Express data objects through an SSL connection is not supported.
In Oracle BAM Active Studio, when the user attempts to save an Excel view using Microsoft Excel 97-2003 format, it is possible that a message that reads "Excel 2007 or greater is required to edit this Excel view" will appear. This is a known issue.
The Oracle BAM-BPEL integration is supported with the use of Oracle BAM Adapter (such as with Oracle BAM sensor actions and BPEL Monitor features). For BPEL processes and other services that attempt to send messages to Oracle BAM, the true status of whether such Oracle BAM invocations succeeded or failed cannot be determined by studying the audit trail for that process instance on the Oracle Enterprise Manager Fusion Middleware Control Console. It is intentionally designed such that a failure to send sensor/monitor data to Oracle BAM should not cause the regular processing of input request (within a BPEL process) to be halted/failed. Accordingly, the console will therefore only report the status for the instance based on the non-Oracle BAM related activities. The Oracle BAM Server invocation failures, if any, will be noticeable in the SOA server diagnostic logs.
If you are using Microsoft Internet Explorer 8, and Oracle BAM Active Studio or one of the other Oracle BAM Web Applications does not open properly (for example, some of the main user interface tabs do not appear), try refreshing or reloading Oracle BAM Active Studio.
If that workaround does not resolve the issue, close Oracle BAM Active Studio, clear your Internet Explorer browser cache (via Tools > Internet Options > Delete), then reopen Oracle BAM Active Studio.
Alternatively, if the above workarounds do not resolve the issue, add the Oracle BAM Web server to Microsoft Internet Explorer's Trusted sites:
Go to Tools > Internet Options > Security > Trusted sites and click Sites.
Uncheck Require server verification (https:) for all sites in this zone if necessary (it is necessary unless you have Oracle BAM set up for SSL).
Add the Oracle BAM URL to the list:
http://<bam_servername>
Float format (decimal separator) is decided by server locale, rather than the user's local Web browser language setting.
For example, when Oracle BAM Server is running on an operating system whose language is using dot (.) as the decimal separator (such as English, Chinese, or Japanese), and the user's local Web browser is set to a language using a comma (,) decimal separator (such as French, German, or Italian), input of number using a comma separator results in the following message:
The value specified is not a valid float
Some of the places where the suer can input numbers are:
1. Filter expression in Oracle BAM Active Studio View Editor.
2. Editing data object content in Oracle BAM Architect.
When the underlying schema (structure) of an Oracle BAM data source is changed (for example, by moving a data object from one folder to another), you must: 1) re-reverse engineer the model which references this data source; 2) manually modify the model so that it accurately reflects the current schema.
If you create a data object in Oracle BAM Architect, and Reverse Engineer it in Oracle Data Integrator Designer, then, in Oracle BAM Architect, create a new folder and move the data object into it, and attempt Reverse Engineer again, the new folder is created in Oracle Data Integrator, but the data object does not move to new location.
In Oracle Data Integrator Operator, the operation fails with the unique constraint error during the Get MetaData step.
Oracle BAM Active Studio requires the Sun JDK patch that fixes JDK bug 6940416.
This section describes documentation errata. It includes the following topics:
Section 19.2.1, "Null Out Values Using DataObjectOperationsByID Web Service"
Section 19.2.2, "Active Now Interval Must be Greater Than Active Data Interval"
Section 19.2.3, "Wildcard in Some Filters on DateTime not Supported on Calculated or Lookup Fields"
Section 19.2.4, "JDBC Data Source Statement-Cache-Size Must Be Set to Zero For Oracle BAM"
In the XML input to DataObjectOperationsByID Web service:
If an element is empty, for example <_Sales_Area></_Sales_Area>, in the payload, then the corresponding column is made null. This is in synch with 10.1.3.x behavior.
In filter expressions, do not set the Active Now interval to be less than the Active Data Interval.
Filters created using the is like or is not like operation on DateTime type fields can contain the wildcard character (%) in the comparison value in the filter expression. However, use of this wildcard character is not supported when the field used in the filter is a calculated field or lookup filed that evaluates to the DateTime or Timestamp type. This wildcard character is only supported for regular record fields.
Also, Compare Date Only is supported for regular DateTime or Timestamp type fields only. It is not supported for Calculated or Lookup fields evaluating to DateTime or Timestamp data type.
For single instance database installs, the statement cache size will already be set to 0 (zero) by default. Do not change this to a non-zero value.
For installs against a RAC database, the statement cache size must manually be set to 0 for each RAC data source; otherwise, data corruption may occur and the Oracle BAM Active Data Cache may need to be restored from a backup (or reinitialized if no backups are available).
Testing equality on Float type values is indeterminate because Float values are approximations (in general, not just in Oracle BAM), so they should never be used for equality checks in filters (the is equal to and is not equal to comparisons).
The alternative is to use Decimal or some other data type. However, if the Float data type must be used, the equality test must be bounded by two ANDed filters of is greater than or equal to and is less than.
This belongs in the documentation as a note in the Oracle Fusion Middleware User's Guide for Oracle Business Activity Monitoring "Filtering Data" section, and in the Oracle BAM Troubleshooting Guide.