1. Release Notes for Oracle WebCenter Sites
  2. Issues Related to Oracle WebCenter Sites Components
  3. Limitations

3 Limitations

This section describes limitations that you may encounter using WebCenter Sites.

Topics

3.1 A/B Testing

  • When you create customized goals for A/B testing of an asset, the Goals dialog box may load slowly.

  • When you search for A/B tests because test summary data needs to be retrieved from Google, the Search results panel may load slowly.

  • The data for A/B tests is only updated after every 24 hours. Therefore, there will be no data to review during the first day the test is running. The data that you review for every consecutive day after the first day will be approximately one day behind.

  • If you use a free Google Analytics account, you can create a maximum of 20 A/B test goals.

3.2 APIs

  • Dynamic loading of a new DataSource using the loadproperty tag is not supported.

  • When the Asset API is used in a standalone application and called from the main method, it does not automatically terminate after the Asset API call is complete (unlike other Java applications). The reason is that the Asset API behaves like another cluster member of WebCenter Sites and boots up all the events in the background. To terminate, code should call System.exit(0).

3.3 Asset Type Name Restrictions

  • All the administrative database tables created by WebCenter Sites are prefixed with FW_ and WCS_ (the tables were added after the 7.5 release of FatWire Content Server and 12.2.1 release of Oracle WebCenter Sites respectively). Asset types should not be created with a prefix of FW_ or WCS_.

  • Do not use the names of any existing database tables while creating a new asset type. To see the list of existing database tables, from the Admin Interface, expand System Tools under the General Admin tree tab, and then double-click Sites Database. On the Sites Database form, specify % in the Enter Table Name field, select Modify Table, and then click OK to list all the database tables.

  • For a given database, the name of a flex asset type must have ten characters less than the maximum number of characters that are allowed for database table names.

  • For a given database, the name of a basic asset type must have five characters less than the maximum number of characters that are allowed for database table names.

  • The attributes "Start Date" and "End Date" are reserved because WebCenter Sites uses them for out-of-the-box asset types. They should not be used in user-created AssetMaker assets.

  • Do not create attributes for assets or assets with the names such as "name", "createdby", "createddate", "updatedby", "updateddate", "startdate", "enddate" and "description" because these attributes are default attributes for every asset that you create.

  • If an asset name has multibyte long text, connector admin rules cannot be created.

3.4 Browser Support

  • If Apache Web Server is not configured to use HTTP 1.1, pages will be cached by Internet Explorer.

  • In Internet Explorer, the Tools > Internet Options > Settings > Every Visit to the page option must be set to true.

3.5 BulkLoader and BulkApprover

  • Without validation, the utility ignores versioning of content. With validation, if the content type is under versioning, the utility will not update the content.

  • Page cache is not flushed by BulkLoader. Because page cache is persistent, the cache should be cleared prior to running BulkApprover.

  • Using BulkApprover requires running WebCenter Sites because BulkApprover is implemented via WebCenter Sites tags.

  • Flex filters are not fired (for example, FieldCopier).

  • BulkLoader does not support blobs. For this, you should use XMLPost.

  • Start and end date cannot be specified nor configured for bulk transferred assets using BulkLoader.

  • BulkLoader should not be executed while WebCenter Sites is running.

  • When assets are added using BulkLoader, the assets will not be indexed in Lucene. You will need to re-index after import.

  • Running multiple BulkLoader instances is not recommended unless they are performing the same operations; for example, all insert or all update, and multiple source tables do not refer to the same asset. Doing so would cause data corruption.

  • BulkApprover will not update the PubAsset table to reflect the publish status after running Approve and Mark Publish.

3.6 CatalogManager

  • If revision tracking is enabled for an object table, and you delete the table using CatalogManager, WebCenter Sites continues to treat the table as revision tracked.

  • WebCenter Sites allows the value in the tablename column in the SystemSQL table to be null. However, for ResultSet caching to work properly, this value must be specified.

  • You cannot log in to WebCenter Sites if your user name has the "id" value of an existing user in the SystemUsers table. For example, DefaultReader has an ID value of 2. If you create a user with the user name "2," that user cannot log in.

3.7 CatalogMover

CatalogMover does not export from columns that hold blobs. For example, a table is created with a column using the data type specified by the property cc.blob. An image is uploaded to the table. When CatalogMover exports the row, the image is not written to the export data.

3.8 CKEditor

In Windows environments, import of Flex assets with CKEditor and TextArea attribute editors fails.

3.9 Collection

Modifying the rank of assets in a collection that has been previously approved does not put the collection into the approval queue, even after rebuilding.

3.10 Content Tags

Newly added tags appear in search results only after a refresh.

3.11 Contributor Interface

  • Use of the browser back button is not supported in this release.

  • Approval and Delete listing screens show references based on evaluation of the layout template. If the layout template execution fails for any reason, the assets presented in the tables may not be correct.

  • Page Layout allows for multiple levels of nested slots. However, the slot properties are only for the first two levels. The tool allows drag-and-drop to multiple levels.

  • Drag-and-drop in the Contributor interface will not work if the page uses an iFrame.

  • Changing device views in Web Mode will not retain unsaved changes.

  • The Contributor interface does not support multiselection of items in docked search mode.

  • The use of Internet Explorer in Compatibility Mode is not supported.

  • If you edit a site in the Web mode, Float values for Flex asset attributes get rounded off.

  • After a session expires, if you click in the Search drop-down in the Contributor interface, an error message is displayed instead of getting redirected to Session Timeout screen.

  • During Site preview, the calendar widget in the Contributor interface does not display time as per the user time zone.

  • If you provide invalid values (values of different data types together, for example, date and money types ) for pull-down attribute editors, Contributor interface alignment gets distorted.

  • Refresh does not work in Delete assets form of an asset.

3.12 Database

WebCenter Sites 12c uses the length specification for strings to specify the underlying database column sizes in bytes. When specifying the maximum length of a text field, keep in mind that multibyte characters will need more bytes per character. The maximum length is limited to 64 bytes for the Name field and 128 bytes for the Description field respectively.

3.13 Developer Tools

  • Developer Tools does not support assets enabled for revision tracking.

  • When you’re importing assets into the SQLServer database from Oracle database using CSDT Eclipse or CSDT Command Line Interface(CLI), in remote cases, the utility may fail.

3.14 Engage

On HTTPS servers, visitor segments are not retrieved.

3.15 Page Cache: inCache

  • Persisting cache to disk clears the Last Access Time and hit count on Remote Satellite Server.

  • The recommendation is to initialize inCache by accessing one page of the site from each of the WebCenter Sites cluster members.

3.16 Installation of WebCenter Sites

  • When cs.use.short.jsp.names=false (the new default value, which used to be true by default), JSP elements that contain dots (such as www.xyz.com/common/flexLinkButton) will not be deployed properly. They will be deployed without the .jsp extension. As a result, the application server will not be able to run them. To work around this, if you use dots in your JSP element names, set cs.use.short.jsp.names=true.

  • When installing a web server in between Remote Satellite Server and WebCenter Sites, you must set the cookie header property http.protocol.single-cookie-header=true in the httpaccess.properties file and place it in the remote_satellite_server install folder/WEB-INF/classes folder.

  • For security reasons, Oracle recommends providing only internal access for the following servlets:

    • CacheServer

    • CatalogManager

    • ContentServer (if you are using Satellite Server only)

    • DebugServer

    • DispatchManager

    • FlushServer

    • version.jsp

    • Install

    • Inventory

    • PageDispatcherServer

    • REST (unless you want to allow REST requests to your delivery server; they are password-protected)

    • SeedDispatchServer

    • SyncSeedDispatchServer

    • TreeManager

  • Sites installation (with sample sites) integrated with Oracle Traffic Director (OTD) fails in Bootstrap process due to timeout issues.

3.17 Localization

  • Non-ASCII characters should not be used in the following Form Name Fields:

    • Site

    • Template

    • Site Entry

    • CS-Element

    • Attribute

    • Recommendation

    • Segment

  • Use only alphanumeric characters for the following:

    • AssetTypes

    • Asset Definitions

    • Asset Subtypes

    • Legal Arguments

3.18 Oracle Access Manager Integration

After integrating your WebCenter Sites instance with Oracle Access Manager, when you try to log into the WebCenter Sites instance, you may get this exception: Unable to create and persist user session. Exception is objecting the login. 

3.19 Publishing

  • Ensure that the maximum number of open file handles for your publishing destination operating system is set to 65000. The source system should be set to at least 32000. These numbers are only a guideline and may need to be adjusted based on the type of data and size of publishing operations.

  • Export to Disk: Exported page is effectively rendered with wrong template when using SIMPLENAME. Contact technical support for a utility to remove the duplicate pub keys.

  • Publishing is not supported from multiple development WebCenter Sites instances to a single delivery WebCenter Sites instance.

3.20 REST APIs

  • The INPUTFORM tag support is limited in the Asset API when you are creating basic asset types via REST. As a result, unsupported INPUTFORM TYPES are interpreted as <INPUTFORM TYPE="TEXT" WIDTH="48" REQUIRED="YES"/>. For users to see proper asset type attributes in WebCenter Sites interfaces, the INPUTFORM tags need to be updated in the asset descriptor file through the database (AssetType table in Oracle WebCenter Sites Explorer).

  • Setting BufferingConfig.xml to use multiple threads is not supported.

  • When using the REST APIs, you may see the following message displayed on the server side. The message can be safely ignored:

    com.sun.jersey.core.impl.provider.xml.SAXParserContextProvider getInstance 
WARNING: JAXP feature XMLConstants.FEATURE_SECURE_PROCESSING cannot be set on a SAXParserFactory. External general entity processing is disabled but other potential security related features will not be enabled.
org.xml.sax.SAXNotRecognizedException:http://javax.xml.XMLConstants/feature/secure-processingSAXParserFactory.

3.21 Satellite Server

WebCenter Sites and Satellite Server must be configured to be in the same time zone.

3.22 Search

  • Lucene fails to index text that comes after dashes, underscores, and other special characters.

  • If indexing takes longer than the cs.timeout setting, exceptions will be thrown and indexing may be in an unstable state. The timeout should be adjusted based on the size of the index.

  • SQL Server only stores milliseconds up to 3.33 millisecond precision with the data type DATETIME.

  • WebCenter Sites does not support indexing of legacy Word 95 documents and throws exceptions in the logs.

  • Lucene standard analyzer treats words differently if they contain a hyphen (-). For example:

    ABC-DEF-HIJ is sometimes indexed as one word and sometimes indexed separately as "ABC" and "DEF-HIJ"; when this occurs, searching for "ABC-DEF-HIJ" will not always return the proper results.

  • Searching for text within XML or HTML tags is not supported.

3.23 Site Capture

  • Status messages are not shown in the application user interface. Check the crawler.log file for log messages.

  • Site Capture session failover is not supported in this release.

3.24 Sites Explorer

Oracle WebCenter Sites Explorer fails to start on some Windows 2008 R2 servers.

3.25 Site Management

  • Creating a site without a Preview asset assigned results in errors in the log, which can be safely ignored.

    CS.XCELERATE.ASSET][ERROR] error: unable to load asset type information for Variables.previewAssetType, in tag asset.load pagename:OpenMarket/Xcelerate/Admin/SiteFront" and "[CS.XML][ERROR] object.get no object named previewAsset"

  • Site names that include a hyphen ('-') are not supported if you are using LDAP.

3.26 Tags

The choice of values entered for a variant attribute used in insite:calltemplate must be applicable to all types valid for the clegal argument.

3.27 Template, Site Entry, and CS-Element

  • Wrapper pages with "." in the name will not execute. Templates and Site Entry assets should not have a dot (.) in their names.

  • Do not use the tag <throwexception> in the code of a template asset. The <throwexception> tag effectively terminates execution in WebCenter Sites for itself and any nested or parent WebCenter Sites engine. This breaks template execution and streaming of data to the client. In addition, when a user approves a template for export publish, a <throwexception> terminates the execution of the approval page and the user gets no feedback.

  • No warning is given regarding the potential for broken pages when templates are deleted. Users should delete templates with care because they may be used as default templates in other assets. Deletion will result in failure to render those pages.

3.28 Upgrade

In upgraded environments, sample sites’ pages of Default, Touch, and Non-Touch site navigations may not be accessed at all times.

3.29 Vanity URL

  • Removing a URL pattern does not remove the URLs based on that pattern.

  • When there are multiple vanity URLs for the same asset, all having the same URL arguments (Template, DeviceGroup, Wrapper), the LinkBuilder API returns the vanity URL  based on its date of creation. The oldest vanity URL is returned instead of returning the vanity URL designated as the default URL by the user.

3.30 WebCenter Content Integration

When importing assets into WebCenter Sites, the WebCenter Content connector does not check asset permissions and will take action regardless of asset-level restrictions (for example, if the asset is revision tracked). This is an Asset API limitation.

3.31 XMLPost

When web server exists in a different machine, importing assets with XMLPost fails.