Misc

Session not found when running both Tomcat and WebLogic

This issue can also manifest itself with a dialog titled Session has expired. Unable to process incoming request. showing up as you try to interact with a form. This comes from the fact that Tomcat and WebLogic handle the JSESSIONID cookie used to track sessions differently:

• Tomcat creates one JSESSIONID per web application, with the cookie path set to the context of the application. When an application invalidates the session, Tomcat sends a new JSESSIONID to the browser.

• WebLogic stores one cookie JSESSIONID with cookie path / for all the applications. This cookie doesn't change when a session is invalidated, and hence there is no one-to-one mapping between a JSESSIONID cookie and a session in WebLogic.

  The error can happen when:

  1. You first access your application deployed on /myapp with Tomcat. Tomcat sets a JSESSIONID cookie for /myapp.

  2. You then access your application on the same server deployed on /myapp with WebLogic. Tomcat sets a JSESSIONID cookie for /.

  3. In subsequent requests, the browser sends the Tomcat JSESSIONID as it is more specific (for /myapp instead of just /), but WebLogic doesn't recognize it, hence the error you're getting.

The solution is simply to clear in your browser all the JSESSIONID cookies for the host you are trying to access.

Data looks garbled on the summary page with MySQL

If when accessing the Form Runner summary page, the data you're seeing looks garbled, then run the following in on your MySQL database:

alter table orbeon_form_definition change xml xml mediumtext collate utf8_unicode_ci;
alter table orbeon_form_data       change xml xml mediumtext collate utf8_unicode_ci;

This instructs MySQL to use the utf8_unicode_ci collation instead of the default utf8_bin, and fixes this issue (#1607). Note that no data was lost; data was always safe in the database, and this only impacted how it was shown on the summary page. The [MySQL DDL for Orbeon Forms 4.5][mysql-45-ddl] has been updated after the 4.5 release, so if you're today installing Orbeon Forms 4.5, you can safely use that DDL and don't need to run the above commands.

[mysql-45-ddl]: https://github.com/orbeon/orbeon-forms/blob/master/form-runner/jvm/src/main/resources/apps/fr/persistence/relational/ddl/mysql-4_5.sql