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former_member185231
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Hi there,

You may never heard of me, or may have seen my name here and there, or probably some of you have meet me in person, but anyway let me introduce myself.

My name is dobromir.zahariev and I'm a Product Owner of the SAP HANA Cloud Platform development tools.

In order to get a full idea of how the developers use our platform I observe closely the SCN space and the OpenSAP trainings related to SAP HANA Cloud Platform for a while. Now, as a result of this research, I created this simplified troubleshooting guide for those of you who just start to explore the platform, and want to cope as much as possible on their own. This is not a list of bugs, but rather a list of well known specifics of the underlying tools and environment, which are easily overcome by the experienced platform developers.

  1. Account creation process seems to be simple and straightforward. Most users do not see any problems here but I've noticed that some of you do not really understand  the User/Landscape/Account/Application/Process model. In short:
    1. Landscape is like data center you want to use - either one for experiments and learning we have or the productive one located either in Europe, USA and Australia.
    2. Account this is the space that you get on the landscape of your choice. You can use your account (space) to deploy and start your applications.
  2. If you are a SAP employee, then your SCN password is automatically generated and you do not know it. In order to proceed further you need to reset your password.
  3. Getting the SDK is considered as more complex than just downloading the archive. This step is a real trap for most of you. Some of the questions you ask are:
    1. Why do I need and SDK? It is needed because it provides a local environment for developing applications, contains all examp....
    2. Why there are several SDK bundles and which one should I pick? If we assume you are in the beginning, then you will need the one that supports the biggest set of features, in order for examples you meet to run on it - so pick the Java EE 6 Web profile. For more information about the features supported by the different runtimes see here.
    3. How do I install it? Just unpack it on your hard drive. That’s all!
  4. Tools installation process is fairly simple for Java developers and pretty complex for those who are not familiar with Java and Eclipse. The difficulties are discussed in the following questions:
    1. How to install Java on my machine?
    2. Why the Java application does not start? - Seems that sometimes OS settings are broken or incomplete.
    3. Which version and package should I download from eclipse.org? As we supports the latest 2 release versions of Eclipse, it is safe to get the latest available Ecli....
    4. How to install Eclipse? Short answer - just unpack it on your hard drive. Long answer - see this link.
    5. How to set my networking settings in Eclipse? Keep in mind that usually you need to restart Eclipse after changing them.
    6. I cannot open hanatrial.ondemand.com in browser and cannot ping it - what should I do? This usually means lack of connectivity to our main data center. As a first step contact your Internet provider and ask them to check the connectivity to hantrial.ondemand.com. In most  cases they will solve this for you, but if you are in a location with bad connectivity to European internet backbone (for example some parts of China and Australia, where the traffic to Europe passes through USA) the internet provider will not be able to help. In this case the only valid working workaround we found is to use a 3rd party free proxy service for installation (just google for such proxy). Bear in mind that this workaround is not secure at all and should be only used for installation purposes as only public resources are accessed.
  5. Setting up the tools after installation seems to be easy, but still not properly followed by some users.
  6. When importing samples from SDK or GitHub, your code refuses to compile. The possible reasons may be:
    1. There is no runtime defined in your workspace
    2. The runtime name is different from the one used when the imported project was created.
    3. The runtime name shown in the tutorials, samples, or video lessons is missing? Actually it was renamed!
    4. The runtime type that you have is different from the runtime type used for the project creation. In general the runtimes we provide can be divided into 2 groups. The basic one (Java Web) and the extended (Java EE 6 Web Profile). Applications that can run on the basic one can run on the extended one, but the opposite is not always possible. So in such cases, you may need to install extended SDK, create a runtime for it and adjust the runtime type of the project.
  7. When using tools for local development - just a few small obstacles appear:
    1. Used computer have limited resources.
    2. You can create only one type of local server - the same type of the SDK you have installed. Good point here is that if you define runtimes of all 3 SDK types, you will be able to create all 3 different local server types.
    3. Your server refuses to start, because the ports it needs are not free. To check the occupied ports you can use netstat command. Then either free required from server ports, or change the server settings to use different ports using local server editor and parameters launch configuration.
    4. You cannot work with the document service - usually because  some precondition steps need to be executed.
  8. When using tools for cloud development you face a lots of problems that we can divide in to following groups:
    1. Compilation problems - the same as in local development (see below)
    2. Networking problems that have some of the following symptoms (see networking issues below).
      1. Add cloud server wizard hangs when fetches the supported runtimes.
      2. Starting or deploying and application takes too long or hangs
      3. The server status is missing within the Servers view.
    3. Authentication problems
      1. Wrong landscape - usually misspelled landscape or the wrong one is used. You should use autocomplete feature where the landscape is asked and be sure you choose the proper one (for trial users it should be hanatrial.ondemand.com).
      2. Wrong user name. You may use your email as username, but you need to know that you also have a generated user name with the following pattern “P<numbers>”. We call it P-USER. This P-USER  can be used on all places where a user name is expected.
      3. Wrong account - the user name you have is bound to an account (space) on a specific landscape. For trial users this account have the following pattern “<P-USER>trial”
      4. User or password is not valid - usually misspelled user or password. Have in mind that several consecutive wrong password attempts will lock your user for 60 minutes.
      5. User is locked. You should wait for 60 minutes before continue. It is a good practice at such situations to cleanup your Eclipse secure storage.
      6. As a first step when troubleshooting such problems try to execute the same step using corresponding console command.
    4. Authorization problems:
      1. User does not have access to this account - You have probably provided a valid user, but tried to access a different account.
    5. Starting an application may hit the Quota limit - You have a limit of 1 (one) compute unit that can be started on trial account. It is good for you that you don't have quota for deployed applications. So simply open the account page, stop the application that is currently started, and then start the new application.

The links in this blog points either to the official SAP HANA Cloud Platform documentation or to the discussions in SCN, where more detailed explanation for issues can be found together with proper solutions.

So that was the basics!

If there is no solution for your case, just ask in SCN 🙂

Enjoy,

Dobri

If you want to go further - check this "Shortest way to taste the cloud (5 minute tutorial)".