Some pages in the Portal are not supported in Chrome
In this case the customer complained that some of the pages running in his portal fail to execute when using Chrome.
He got this annoying message:
The portal shell (TLN, DTN, etc.) – was rendered well.
What could the issue be?
The first thing I checked was the value of the Supported User Agents property on one of the pages that triggered this message.
The value should be (MSIE, >=5.5, *) (Netscape, *, *) (Mozilla,*,*) (Safari, >=3.1, *) (MSIE, >=5.5, *) (Netscape, *, *) (Mozilla,*,*) (Safari, >=3.1, *) (Chrome,*,*)
If the (Chrome,*,*) part is missing from this list – the page won’t be rendered in Chrome.
Well, the value for that page was OK.
Now this was getting interesting! What could be the issue then?
The next thing I did was to change the framework page. This specific customer has a custom framework page, and I thought that maybe there was something he had added to the pages in this framework page that missed the (Chrome,*,*) value and caused the page failure. If any object within the page is missing this value the entire page will fail!
The issue was reproduced also in the Classic Framework Page. So it wasn’t an issue with the framework page.
Hmmm…
At this stage I raised the log level of the userAgent location to “All”. The location of userAgent is com.sap.portal.portal. I did it through the logWatch. You can learn how to use logWatch here.
In the recorded log I found the culprit! – There was a log at debug level for every UI element which specifies the supported userAgents.
One of the elements was the layout, and the layout didn’t have the (Chrome,*,*) value!
So it was the layout. It didn’t have the (Chrome,*,*) value and it caused the failure of the entire page.
You won’t see the layout object in the Portal Catalog, but you can see it if you explore the page in the PCD Inspector.
So I opened the object through the PCD inspector and there I saw that the property of the layout object was indeed missing the (Chome,*,*) value.
In this specific case it wasn’t only a single iView that wasn’t supported by Chrome, but many of the portal iViews. That meant that the root cause was the layout template object.
You can view the layout inheritance hierarchy by selecting it and clicking the “DL” button in the PCD Inspector:
The layout object inherits the property value from the template, so it should be fixed in the template and it will affect all the objects that inherit from it, unless one of the objects overrides the default value of the template.
After the “SupportedUserAgent” was reset for the layout template – the issue was fixed and the pages rendered well in Chrome.
That’s it!
This blog is the first support case that I document.
The entry point to my support blogs will be from here
See you in my next blog…
Good to see that your team is sharing real time experience of solving customer bugs in this forum. Thanks and keep posting!
Hello Maya,
nice work! 🙂
We didn't have that problem yet, but this is a great way to describe what to do. Also I was reminded of two tools (the logWatch and the PCD inspector), that I don't normally have on my radar.
I like your writing style, too. ^^
Regards,
Steffi.
Great blog Maya!
Written nicely and very easy to follow, good job 🙂 .
Saar
Hi Maya,
this is very useful information, and thank you for sharing it, question, why not to make a Knowledge Base Article (KBA) for such guidance coming from SAP instead of a blog ?
Best regards,
Andy.
Thank you for the encouraging comments!
I’m glad you liked this blog.
@Andy – as for your question – why blog and not KBA – well – Blog is more informal way to share issues that I’m experiencing and also present the way I analyze the issue and give you tools for troubleshooting. Also blog is more interactive – I can answer questions in comments (as I do now 🙂 ) and last but not least – it’s easy to find and track via the SCN notification and search capabilities.
I believe that some of my posts will be based on existing KBAs and I will refer you to them, and if I will find it necessary – I will also suggest to create a KBA for the discussed topic.
Hi Maya,
it's great that you will be sharing your strategies for analyzing problems, and you are right such guidance is excellent material for articles on the SCN.
Recently SAP CEO Bill McDermott gave a keynote speech at SAPPHIRE where he talked about 'simple' and the next generation of SIMPLEr SAP products.
Something we should all take back from Bill's thought leadership is to go deeper into the world of simple.
We all know, SAP Basis Engineers spend a lot of time hunting for information on issues and solutions, this can be investigating an issue on a system and hunting on the OSS, SMP, SCN etc for information on the issue. Alternatively, planning for new implementations and products also requires thorough planning and preparation and investigation.
All of this takes a lt of time a lot of man hours, and consequently costs SAP Customers a lot of money.
Imagine if this could be simplified, if searching for information, research for projects, implementations, upgrades could be simplified, imagine how much time and money could be saved, and spent alternatively on other SAP products and solutions, and getting more value from SAP assets.
And that's why, reading the first blog, that SAP are introducing yet another channel for Portal information, this blog series and their container, just made me wonder that perhaps, this is contributing to make things more complicated when infact we should be making things SIMPLEr with less channels of information, consolidated so that the information people need is contained in as few locations as possible.
To conclude, excellent information for Portal people, and suggestion that thought is given to consolidating information delivery channels instead of expanding for problem solutions and implementation guidance..
I really look forward to more blogs from you giving an insight into the strategies used at SAP Support for solving problems.
Best regards,
Andy.
Hi Maya
Thanks Very much!!
Such annoying error, but your blog is a clear and very good answered!!!