This chapter describes issues associated with Oracle Business Activity Monitoring. It includes the following topics:
The issues and workarounds listed here are those that were known at the time of the product's initial release to the public. Additional issues and workarounds may have been discovered since the initial release. To view the latest known issues associated with Oracle SOA Suite, BPM Suite, and related SOA technologies, go to the Oracle Technology Network (OTN) at: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/docs/aiasoarelnotes-196861.html.
This section describes general issue and workarounds. It includes the following topics:
Section 21.1.5, "Active Studio Tabs Display Incorrectly With Microsoft Internet Explorer 8"
Section 21.1.6, "Active Studio View Editor Tabs Display Incorrectly With Some Versions of Sun JDK"
Section 21.1.8, "Optional Upgrade Procedure for Oracle BAM Monitor Express Sample"
Section 21.1.9, "Database Must Be Started Before Oracle BAM"
Section 21.1.11, "Negative Scale When Adding Number Field While Defining External Data Source"
Section 21.1.12, "Error in Chart Views When Using Continuous Streaming of Data"
Section 21.1.14, "DB2 Does Not Allow Conversion From Datetime Field to Integer"
Section 21.1.15, "Batched Messages Lost on BPEL Server Restart"
Section 21.1.19, "Unable to Create or View Report With User With No Permissions on System Folder"
Section 21.1.20, "Opening Report on Two Systems Causes Language Mix"
Section 21.1.21, "Oracle BAM Event Engine Cannot Call WS-Security-Enabled Web Services"
Section 21.1.22, "Use Single Quotation Marks in ICommand Web Service Export Command"
Section 21.1.23, "Alert Fires Multiple Times Using COUNTDISTINCT Aggregate"
Section 21.1.24, "Select Higher Time Groupings in Crosstab Views"
Section 21.1.27, "SSL Connection to Oracle BAM Is Not Supported for Monitor Express"
Section 21.1.29, "Input of Numbers Is Not Localized As Per Browser Locale"
Section 21.1.30, "Unique Constraint Error in Oracle Data Integrator After Moving a Data Object"
Section 21.1.31, "AssignTask Action Form Template Must Be Edited Before Using It"
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 2 GHz or faster minimum (a faster processor may be necessary to view complex dashboards)
1 GB 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.
Preview features are for evaluation only.
Error handling for Enterprise Message Sources (see Section 21.2.1, "Preview Feature: Enterprise Message Source Error Handling").
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.
If you are using Microsoft Internet Explorer 8, and Oracle BAM Active Studio, or any of the Oracle BAM Web Applications, does not open properly (for example, some of the main user interface tabs do not appear), refresh your web browser or reload Oracle BAM Active Studio.
If that workaround does not resolve the issue, close Oracle BAM Active Studio, and clear your Internet Explorer browser cache (go to Tools > Internet Options > Browser history > Delete > Temporary Internet Files > Delete files), then reopen Oracle BAM Active Studio.
If the above workarounds do not resolve the issue, follow these steps to 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_hostname>
Some versions of the Sun JDK cause the Active Studio View Editor tabs to display incorrectly. The View Editor tabs may appear empty without any tab text. This issue can occur with any version of Oracle BAM.
To resolve this issue, the Oracle BAM Server requires the Sun JDK patch that fixes JDK bug 6940416. Generally, Sun JDK version 1.6.0_24 or later will resolve the issue.
An interaction between McAfee Host Intrusion Prevention 7 and Microsoft Internet Explorer update KB2416400 causes Charts and KPIs to display incorrectly.
If you are using McAfee Host Intrusion Prevention and this issue occurs, you can resolve it using one of the following workarounds:
1. Uninstall the Microsoft Internet Explorer KB2416400 update.
or
2. Disable Signature 3776 for McAfee Host Intrusion Prevention. Ask your IT Administrator if applicable.
Links:
MS10-090: Cumulative security update for Internet Explorer
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2416400/
KB70810: Host Intrusion Prevention Signature 3776 triggers after applying Microsoft security update MS10-090
https://kc.mcafee.com/corporate/index?elq_mid=4718&elq_cid=372908&page=content&id=KB70810
Note that this upgrade is optional. It is not a required step for customers migrating from Oracle BAM 11gR1 PS2 to PS3.
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.
Microsoft Internet Explorer KB2416400 update causes Charts and KPIs to display incorrectly. To work around this issue, uninstall the Microsoft Internet Explorer KB2416400 update.
Negative scale of -127 is set for Number data types when creating external data source. To workaround change the data type to Float and save the external data source definition.
Reports with multiple charts using continuous time series and Active Now, with a short time interval, might require user to disable the chart movement during transition feature (called animation) or make sure that the report is viewed on hardware which can handle fast processing.
To disable the chart movement during transition feature (animation), follow the steps below for all chart views in the report :
1. Open the report in edit mode in Oracle BAM Active Studio.
2. Select the view (chart type) you want to edit and click on Edit View in the View tasks/Options frame in the left hand side of the window.
3. Click on the properties icon and select the Active Data tab.
4. Check the option Disable Chart movement on transition.
5. Click OK and save the report.
alternatively, you can also make sure that the client system on which the report will be viewed has good processing power to handle these kind of performance intensive reports. The requirement for reports might differ based on the complexity of the report.
On restarting Admin Server, where a BAM data control application is deployed to the Admin Server, there is a "PS-01520: Cannot initialize identity store." exception seen in the logs.
In DB2, the datatype change from datetime field to integer is not allowed. Currently the system does not prompt the user that this change is not allowed. If the user wants to make the change, the user should drop the column and re-add a different column. The data will be lost in this case.
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.
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.
Deployment to Oracle BAM Monitor Express data objects through an SSL connection is not supported.
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.
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.
The AssignTask template provided for the Action Form view in Oracle BAM is not usable as it is. To use the AssignTask template in an Action Form, and have input fields for mapping and association, those input fields must have an attribute named rtsEnabledID. None of the input fields in the AssignTask template (seeded in the /System/Views/Action Form Templates data object) have the rtsEnabledID attribute in them, therefore none of them are available for mapping and association in the Action Form View Editor.
An example of an input field with the rtsEnabledID attribute is shown here:
<input type="text" name="text223222" size="49" style="width:300px" rtsEnabledID="OtherRecipient" />
If you want to use the AssignTask template, you must manually edit the template to add the rtsEnabledID attribute to the input fields you want available in the Action Form for mapping and association, and then update the template in the Action Form Templates data object.
Here the steps to perform this task:
Access the Oracle BAM instance you have and login into it using the Oracle BAM Start Page.
On the Oracle BAM Start Page, click Architect.
In the Architect page, in the data object browser, select the Data Object/System/Views/Action Form Template data object.
Click the Contents link on the top of right-hand frame.
Click Edit Contents.
Scroll to the right end of the data object contents, and click Edit on the row that contains the template with name AssignTask.
Copy the contents of the FormInput column for this row and paste it into a text editor.
Select the inputs that you want to make available in the Action Form for mapping and association, and add the attribute rtsEnabledID to the element as shown in the following example. The value for this attribute must be a unique ID. For example, for the text area for the Description in the template, after adding the attribute will look like
<textarea name="textarea" cols="51" rows="6" wrap="virtual" class="PSLONGEDITBOX" style="width:600px" rtsEnabledID="TaskDescription"></textarea>
Make sure that the template HTML does not contain any line breaks.
After making the changes, paste the template back in the FormInput column of the template, and click Save.
This section describes documentation errata. It includes the following topics:
Section 21.2.1, "Preview Feature: Enterprise Message Source Error Handling"
Section 21.2.2, "Null Out Values Using DataObjectOperationsByID Web Service"
Section 21.2.3, "Active Now Interval Must be Greater Than Active Data Interval"
Section 21.2.4, "Wildcard in Some Filters on DateTime not Supported on Calculated or Lookup Fields"
Section 21.2.6, "JDBC Data Source Statement-Cache-Size Must Be Set to Zero For Oracle BAM"
Section 21.2.8, "Group By in Calculations Not Supported for Views That Already Have Grouping"
A new set of fault configuration options in Oracle BAM Architect definition handles errors in handling the Oracle BAM Enterprise Message Source (EMS) payload in a number of ways: logging to log file, inserting a row into a data object, or publishing the error message to a JMS topic or queue.
To configure fault handling, open Oracle BAM Architect, and select or create a new EMS. At the bottom of the configuration screen are a set of Faults options: Log faulted messages and Write faulted messages. You can select one or both options.
Select Log faulted messages to send error messages to the log, and select Include payloads to include the payload with the message.
Select Write faulted messages to write the message to an Oracle BAM data object or a JMS topic. You can select only one of the write options.
Select To Data Objects to insert the message in a data object, and provide the data object name and the field to which to write the error message.
Select JMS Queue/Topic to write the message to JMS, and provide the appropriate values for each required field.
The following example is the format of the published message:
EMS <<EMS Name>> failed to process the payload: <<payload>> with the following exception:<<Exception details>>.
For example:
An EMS, MyInsertEMS, failed to process the payload: <testems><test>abcd</test1> with the following exception:
The end-tag for element type "test" must end with a '>' delimiter.
Use caution while designing the fault handling when the error message is pushed to a JMS topic or queue. If this topic or queue is in turn configured for another (or the same) EMS, then that EMS will pull the same message again which fails recursively. Although Oracle BAM has taken care of the message by encoding that message with a CDATA, there might be other issues such as SQL exceptions that might fail recursively.
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.
Some Oracle BAM Web service configuration parameters (detailed below) are new in 11.1.1.3.0.
The parameters are configured in the following location:
$MW_HOME/user_projects/domains/<domain-name>/servers/<bam-server-name>/tmp/_WL_ user/oracle-bam_11.1.1/1o1igs/APP-INF/classes/config/BAMWebConfig.xml
The 1o1igs directory in the path above is created when Oracle BAM Server is started and does not have a static name.
Hence the user needs to search for BAMWebConfig.xml file under the following location, and then edit the file to add the parameters described below.
$MW_HOME/user_projects/domains/<domain-name>/servers/<bam-server-name>/tmp/_WL_ user/oracle-bam_11.1.1
Webservices_Batching_Is_Enabled
Type: Boolean
Valid values: true/false
Default value: false
Description: Determines if Oracle BAM Web services should use Active Data Cache API batching.
Webservices_Batching_Limit_Upper
Type: Integer
Default value: 500
Description: Batch size upper limit when Active Data Cache API batching is used.
Webservices_Batching_Limit_Lower
Type: Integer
Default value: 100
Description: Batch size lower limit when Active Data Cache API batching is used.
Type: Integer
Default value: 50
Explanation: Batch time-out when Active Data Cache API batching is used.
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 an Oracle RAC database, the statement cache size must manually be set to 0 for each Oracle 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.
In the Oracle BAM Active Sutio view editor, in the calculations tab, the Group By button is grayed out for views other than List and Excel, and is not usable. This feature is not supported for views which already have some grouping in them, such as charts and crosstabs.