This section of the Readme contains late-breaking information related to the PowerPlay Enterprise Server/PowerPlay Web components.
Having a mixed install of Series 7 Version 3 (7.3) MR2 BI products and/or Cognos Planning or Cognos Finance 7.3 SP3 on the same computer as earlier releases of these 7.3 products may cause these earlier releases to fail. The problems occur due to backwards compatibility issues found in the following components: UDA, XALAN and Cognos Web Services (CWS) with Cognos Visualizer.
Note that you will not have these problems if the products on the same computer are all at 7.3 MR2 and SP3 level, or if you install 7.3 MR2/SP3 products on one computer and have other products running 7.3 pre-MR2 or pre-SP3 on a different computer. For example, having Upfront and PowerPlay 7.3 MR2 on MyServerA, drilling through or launching an IWR 7.3 MR1 report on MyServerB will not cause a problem.
If you cannot follow the corrective actions described below, then you must revert all products on the computer to their previous state by restoring them from the backup you made before installing the MR2 maintenance release or SP3 service pack.
The UDA problem may be experienced by the products in Table A, when only a subset of the installed products is upgraded to MR2 or SP3.
The symptoms experienced are varied - there is no common message that identifies the problem. Before working with Customer Support to isolate your specific problem you must eliminate this known UDA issue as being the root cause. Examples of symptoms that have been encountered with 7.3 pre-MR2 products include, but are not limited to:
The build numbers of the UDA component causing the problem are in the range 7.8.23148 to 7.8.24101. To check build numbers, review the contents of your cmplst.txt file located in the <install_location>\cognos\cer4 directory. UDA component build numbers can be found in the [Services] section of cmplst.txt. Note that this is only an issue if there are any products or components in the file that have a 7.3 pre-MR2 or pre-SP3 version.
To resolve this issue you must:
The XALAN problem will be experienced by the products in Table B1, when any of the products in Table B2 are upgraded to MR2 on the specified platforms.
The symptoms experienced depend on the upgrade scenario.
If PowerPlay Enterprise Server 7.3 is kept at the Initial or MR1 level, and any of the previously listed products in Table B2 is upgraded to MR2, then accessing a cube from Cognos PowerPlay Web Explorer using the Enhanced UI may either result in a blank screen or the following message:
Internal error - request failed.
Please contact your administrator
If Cognos Visualizer Server 7.3 is kept at the Initial or MR1 level, and any of the previously listed products in Table B2 is upgraded to MR2, then a Visualizer message is displayed:
Web Browser:
There was an error in the XSL Parse engine.
The return code was: -1
The data returned was:
The error occurred during loading the stylesheet (/viz/templates/en/ZFPIndexPage.xsl), please ensure the stylesheet is valid
Please contact your administrator
Table of Content:
There was an error in the XSL Parse engine.
The return code was: -1
The data returned was:
The error occurred during loading the stylesheet (TOC.xsl), please ensure the stylesheet is valid
Please contact your administrator
The build numbers of the XALAN component causing the problem are in the range 1.2.659 to 1.2.868. To check build numbers, review the contents of your cmplst.txt file located in the <install_location>\cognos\cer4 directory. XALAN component build numbers can be found in the [Third Party] section of cmplst.txt. Note that this is only an issue if the file also contains a pre-MR2 7.3 version of PowerPlay Enterprise Server or Cognos Visualizer Authoring or Server.
To resolve this issue you must request from Customer support a new post-MR2 hot site build for all the products in Table B2 that you want to upgrade to MR2.
The CWS problem will be experienced by the products in Table C1, when any of the products in Table C2 are upgraded to MR2 on the specified platforms.
Cognos Web Services, only when used with Cognos Visualizer Server |
The symptoms are experienced when Cognos Visualizer Server 7.3 is kept at the Initial or MR1 level, and any of the previously listed products in Table C2 is upgraded to MR2. The error messages displayed are dependent on the platform as follows:
On HP-UX the following message is displayed when you configure:
configcp ->/usr/lib/dld.sl: Unresolved symbol: XML_ParserCreateNS (code) from ./libvizxml.sl core file from 'vizwebcws' - received SIGABRT configcp ->/usr/lib/dld.sl: Unresolved symbol: XML_ParserCreateNS (code) from ./libvizxml.sl core file from 'vizwebcws' - received SIGABRT
On Solaris the following message is displayed when you run some CWS requests:
Application Error
The following error has occurred:
The request failed because the server timed out. No Query Processor was available to handle the request.
The build numbers of the Visualizer Server Dispatcher or Query and Report Processor components causing the problem is in the range 600 to 1005. To check build numbers, review the contents of your cmplst.txt file located in the <install_location>\cognos\cer4 directory. Visualizer Server component build numbers can be found in the [Main Applications] section of cmplst.txt.
To resolve this issue you must request from Customer support:
You will not experience this problem if you have a mixed install of RTM/MR1 and MR3 or MR2 and MR3.
Installing a 7.3 MR2 hot site of certain BI products on the same computer where PowerPlay Enterprise Server or Visualizer 7.3 MR2 is also installed may cause PowerPlay or Visualizer to fail. The problems occur due to backwards compatibility issues found in the XALAN component.
Note that you will not have these problems if the products on the same computer are all at any 7.3 MR2 hot site level, or if you install 7.3 MR2 products on one computer and have other products running at the 7.3 MR2 hot site level on a different computer. For example, having Visualizer Server 7.3 MR2 on MyServerA drilling through to PowerPlay Enterprise Server 7.3 MR2 hot site on MyServerB will not cause a problem.
If you cannot follow the corrective actions described below, then you must revert all products on the computer to their previous state by restoring from the backup you made before installing the MR2 hot site.
The XALAN problem will be experienced by the products in Table A1, when any of the products in Table A2 are upgraded to an MR2 hot site on the specified platforms.
The symptoms experienced depend on the upgrade scenario.
If PowerPlay Enterprise Server 7.3 is kept at the MR2 level, and any of the previously listed products in Table A2 is upgraded to an MR2 hot site, then accessing a cube from Cognos PowerPlay Web Explorer using the Enhanced UI may either result in a blank screen or the following message:
Cognos PowerPlay Web Explorer
The PowerPlay server is busy and cannot complete the request. Please try again.
Please try again or contact your administrator
If Cognos Visualizer Server 7.3 is kept at the MR2 level, and any of the previously listed products in Table A2 is upgraded to an MR2 hot site, then the Visualizer application server may fail to start. The message displayed to the user on the web browser may be:
Application Error
The following error has occurred:
The Cognos Visualizer Web server is not available.
The build numbers of the products in Table A1 impacted by the problem are in the range 7.3.1200 to 7.3.1299. To check build numbers, review the contents of your cmplst.txt file located in the <install_location>\cognos\cer4 directory. Product build numbers can be found in the [Main Applications] section of cmplst.txt. Note that this is only an issue if the file also contains a 7.3 MR2 hot site version of any of the products listed in Table A2 with build numbers in the range 7.3.1300 to 7.3.1399.
To resolve this issue you must request new post-MR2 hot site builds from Customer support for all of the products listed in Table A1, if they are also installed on this same computer.
You will not experience this problem if you install MR3 or a post MR3 hot site.
When you run a query using data or metadata in a DB2 OLAP server, you may see an exception window indicating that something wrong happened with the query.
The error occurred because Windows did not have enough remote procedure call (RPC) ports available.
To resolve this problem, you must increase the number of RCP ports that are available for program use. You do this by creating a MaxUserPort TCP/IP entry in the Registry Editor.
Important: Use Registry Editor at your own risk. Incorrect use may cause problems that require you to reinstall your operating system. Microsoft cannot guarantee that you can solve problems that result from using Registry Editor incorrectly.
Administrators are strongly advised to use the MountAt folder option when configuring failover environments. This will allow administrator-published cubes and reports published as links to be accessible from Upfront if the main dispatcher fails.
The MountAt folder must be identically named on all PPES servers and must point to the same physical location. We recommend that administrators not use the MountAt folder option on a collection (folders with a source specified).
Do not use mapped drives on Windows 2000 when specifying MountAt locations, as rebooting may cause errors.
If your operating system is Windows XP and you use Firefox 1.0.4 as your Web browser, when you run a PowerPlay Web report in Windows from Upfront (Action/Run Report in Windows), the current Firefox browser instance will freeze.
This problem has no workaround. To close the frozen Firefox browser instance, open the Windows Task Manager and end the Firefox task.
In the Configuration Manager User Guide, under "Change the Apache Web Server Settings for Apache Module Gateways", the gateway configuration for multiple server groups is documented as "<XX>GroupGatewayDirectory", where <XX> is the prefix of the Cognos product you are configuring.
If you configure the Cognos Visualizer Server or the PowerPlay Enterprise Server using this parameter, you will receive the following error message:
Invalid command '<XX>GroupGatewayDirectory', perhaps mis-spelled or defined by a module not included in the server configuration
To resolve this situation, use the parameter "GatewayDirectory " instead of "<XX>GroupGatewayDirectory" when configuring the Apache Module gateways for the Cognos Visualizer Server and PowerPlay Enterprise Server for multiple server groups.
If you try to bookmark a PowerPlay custom subset on the Web when running Windows XP SP1, the following error message appears:
IIS has encountered a problem and needs to close.
When you click OK, the browser issues a "page cannot be displayed" message, citing as a reason: "Cannot find server or DNS Error".
To resolve this problem, upgrade to Windows XP SP2 in situations where PowerPlay Enterprise Server is running with IIS.
If you are using JRE 1.3 and try to run the PowerPlay administration tools under UNIX within a GUI environment such as XWindows, certain input actions do not work as expected:
To avoid these user interaction problems when running the PowerPlay administration tools on UNIX, we recommend that you use JRE 1.4.
To enable the Publish to Cognos ReportNet or Cognos 8 capability from PowerPlay Enterprise Server, you must use the same format to identify the Series 7 namespace in both Cognos Series 7 Version 3 and Cognos ReportNet.
If you specify a hostname in one product and then use the IP address:port format in the other, PowerPlay Enterprise Server is not able to publish to the Cognos ReportNet portal. Instead, it detects a mismatched configuration, prompts for credentials and, even if valid credentials are entered, raises a "Publish failed" error.
The solution is to use the same format to identify the Cognos Series 7 directory server in both products.
When using PowerPlay Enterprise Server Administration on Windows XP to add a folder, cube or report, only local drives appear in the drop-down list for Folder Source, Cube Source, or Report Source. If you type a letter corresponding to a mapped network drive that contains cubes or reports, the cubes and reports don't appear.
To specify a network location as the source for a folder, cube, or report, do one of the following.
In this release of PowerPlay Enterprise Server, support for SAP BW 3.0 and 3.1 is provided to the extent that the product supported the features of SAP BW 2.0. Users may encounter unpredictable behavior when using features such as virtual hierarchies, or other features new to SAP 3.0 or 3.1.
Users of the integrated PowerPlay and Cognos ReportNet or Cognos 8 solution using Cognos Connection as the portal will not be able to access PowerCube data under specific user class views. The only option available to access secure PowerCubes is via <All User Classes>.
If you add special characters such as ampersands or euro symbols to report titles in PowerPlay Web, these characters may not display properly in the header of an exported Excel file. This problem only occurs if the administrator has configured the PPSRoot.cfx file in the installation_location\cern\ppserver directory to say the following:
ExcelTitleInWorksheet="IN,Y,0"
This setting specifies that titles appear in the Excel header instead of the first line of the Excel worksheet.
To avoid this problem, specify that titles appear in the first line of the exported Excel worksheet, instead of the header, by resetting to the default value in the PPSRoot.cfx file as follows:
ExcelTitleInWorksheet="IN,Y,1"
Accessibility references in existing localized documentation imply that the accessibility features have been localized. To date, the accessibility features are limited to English, with the exception of the Upfront Accessible theme, which was recently made available in French. Currently, accessibility features are not available in any other localized products.