Portal framework page unavailable

[hofmann]

This is a topic I wanted to blog about since a few years.

The most annoying errors are the ones that spontaneously appear. Yesterday it worked; today you get an error message. Worse when the usual root cause and solutions do not help. This is even more disturbing when suddenly the whole SAP Portal is inaccessible. LIke this error: "Error  occured while trying to access frameworkpage. [...] The object does not exist or you are not authorized to access it".

When you are the administrator and get the above message: this means problems and work for you. There are several discussions and solutions available here on SCN that indicate that you do not have the permissions to use the framework page; that you should try to access the PCD directly, and so on. In case these tips do not help, read on (maybe you`ll learn something about SAP Portal too).

Trace down the problem

Use NWA to see the logs. Taking a close look at the reported error messages, the application sap.com/com.sap.portal.navigation.service did not start.

Clicking the link provided in the filed Message ID does not help, as the wiki page does not exist in SCN. Following the error message flow, the root cause seems to be JRA.

That an error related to JRA causes the portal navigation to stop working looks a bit strange. To confirm that, check the portal navigation application status.

NWA -> Operations -> Systems -> Start & Stop -> Java Applications

It is clear that the portal navigation is stopped because a dependency failed. Opening service com.sap.portal.naviation.service lists the failed dependency.

This service depends on sap.com/com.sap.portal.ivs.global.bridge, which itself depends on sap.com/tc~epbc~prt~apps~restricted, that depends on sap.com/com.sap.prt.application.rfcframework, that on sap.com/tc~bl~jra~api, depending  on sap.com/tc~sapjra. The last one is not stopped because of a failed dependency, it failed to start:

Conclusion: the SAP Portal navigation depends on SAP`s JRA.

When you know what JRA means, you know where to look for the error. For those who don`t know, SAP gives you a hint in the resource tab of the application.

NWA -> Configuration -> Infrastructure -> Application Resources -> Resource Adaptors -> SAPJavaResourceAdapter15

That is the standard resource adapter from SAP that servers as a template for other resource adapters to connect to SAP ABAP systems.

A not so obvious but very important parameter is:

• MaxReaderThreadCount

In case RA is not configured, this value is 0 => meaning NetWeaver won`t start a single thread for this adapter and therefore not activate / register it.

In case this parameter is set to >= 1, a thread will be started during start up of the server and the adapter thread gets activated / registered. When nothing else is configured or the server is not available, JRA won't start. As shown above, this has a huge impact on the portal. To make sure that JRA won't start use the adapter, change the value to 0. After changing the value to 0 the failed and stopped services can be started using NWA or by performing a restart of the portal.

Short: if this resource adapter is configured, the configuration needs to valid. If not, the service won`t start.*

Conclusion

This behavior is valid since at least CE 7.2. I did not test this now explicitly with 7.3 too, but in 7.2 the JRA also fails to start when the server configuration in the resource adapter is valid, but the server is not reachable. I do not know why the portal navigation depends on the JRA service to be up and running. I also do not know why setting the MaxReaderThreadCount to >= 1 leads the JRA component to fail when all the other parameters are not set. When the configured backend ABAP system is not available - system decommissioned, name/IP changed - the same error will occur. I think a misconfiguration of the resource adapter should be treated more gracefully by NetWeaver. For instance, why not check if a server is configured and available?

In case this error only occurs when using the standard resource adapter SAPJavaResourceAdapter15 and not on a copy of it, why not make this RA read only or simply ignore its configuration? (did not test that scenario)

Final remark: SAP, when you provide a link in an error message, make sure that the link is working.

*I read somewhere in SAP Help that you should create a copy of the default resource adapter.