nav[aria-label="Primary Navigation"] { padding: 0; & ul { list-style: none; width: 100%; display: flex; flex-direction: row; justify-content: start; align-items: start; gap: 30px; padding: 0; & li { margin: 0; } & ul li { list-style: none; } } }

Deployment external task not running

Anip

I'm writing my first workflow and am filled with frustration. Its a very simple workflow, it had a submit task then an external task to deploy. The workflow is kicking off ok and running smoothly until the external task which just doesn't appear to be happening and the workflow hangs.

The external task just does an iwodstart to begin a deployment. I know my deployment is fine because I've done it manually from within Open Deploy and from command line.

From the Content Centre I can see that the job is running and the external task is active, I've confirmed the same with iwgetwfobj. I can also see that my file is attached to the job. The external task runs fine from the command line outside of the workflow. It also runs fine from the command line within the job/task (I commented out the callback and ran it from within the job passing it the jobid, taskid, areavpath and files).

I have the external task writing out messages with comments and values to a text file. Running the task from both outside and within the job from the command line wrote out these comments as expected but when I try to run it from the workflow within Teamsite itself nothing is written to my debug file indicating that the process doesn't even start.

Am I right in thinking it runs as SYSTEM on Windows so it shouldn't be a permissions issue. I don't know what else to consider.

How else can I debug this?

any help appreciated
cheers
Ani

Find more posts tagged with

Comments

Adam Stoller

First, the basics: Please provide TeamSite version (invluding patches and service packs), OD version (including patches and service packs and complete OS (you're on Windows - but is it W2K or WNT or something else?)

Secondly, please post the WFT *and* the externaltask script - without seeing both of these pieces of the puzzle - we're just shooting in the dark.

If I had to guess - the command string in the WFT doesn't explicitly reference iwperl to run the script you wrote. It will be a lot easier to confirm or deny that issue when we can see the code in question.

--fish
Senior Consultant, Quotient Inc.
http://www.quotient-inc.com

Anip

Hi Fish,

Thanks for getting back to me.

This will need to run on Teamsite 5.1 SP1 (W2K) but I've also been trying it on another box which has 6.1 no service packs (W2K). The 6.1 box is currently in development and being prepared to take over from the old 5.1. The scripts are taken from ones currently in use in the 5.1 box and slightly changed for re-use here.

While searching I found a couple of other posts of people who'd had similar problems, one said it was permissions for the Teamsite user to be able to run scripts and the other talked of wrapping .ipl scripts in .cgi. Do either of these sound probable for my situation?

It's very possible I'm missing something obvious, this is the first time I've tried creating a workflow and external task - hence the re-use of ones I knew to work. I've attached the wft (submit.wft) and external task script (publish_and_deploy_ExternalCommunities.ipl).

thanks
Ani

Adam Stoller

The WFT code shows that you are invoking: iwperl scriptname - so that part of the puzzle looks okay.

The externaltask's areavpath is in STAGING, but you have explicitly set the externaltask to be readonly - so that looks okay (I assume the areavpath used is legitimate, otherwise you'd get some error message).

The script should have a #! line at the top - though given the way it's being run it shouldn't be critical.

I'd suggest using forward-slashes (/) in your script rather than double-back-slashes (\\) as it makes the code easier to read, more portable, and less likely to contain errors of omission (\ vs. \\) which tend to be a pain to track down (however, that doesn't seem to be the case here)

Since you're on Windows - I believe you can set $IW_OD_HOME to the value of $ENV{IWODHOME} rather than hard-coding a "short-path" to it.

Are you sure that when you run this script from within the workflow that no text gets entered into c:/temp/deploy.txt ? and that that file exists and has fully open permissions to be written to by any user?

You should probably verify that the task object you create near the top is valid: if (! $task->IsValid()){ ...error situation...} just to be sure that you are getting the right value in your taskid, which you should be.

Your externaltask defines two successors - one for success, one for failure, but the externaltask script currently always assumes success. When you get the execution of the externaltask script sorted out - you probably need to fix the logic in the code to be able to handle success and failure modes. (you indicated which version of TeamSite you're using, but you haven't indicated which version of OpenDeploy)

From a general critique - the script defines $IWPERL for no reason, and hard-codes the name of the deployment configuration rather than passing it in on the command line (it would come *before* $jobid).

The deployment command does not use the '-inst' flag - and thus you cannot run this deployment multiple times without the prior invokation having already finished - so if the deployment takes a while, you may have to wait a while in-between attempts to run this script.

The deployment command doesn't appear to use any '-k' flags either - which would seem to indicate that the deployment configuration has hard-coded paths and is a full directory-diff deployment (no filelist) - which may potentially be overkill for a workflow-based deployment. However, it should still attempt to run and you should still be getting some debugging text in your debug file.

From what I can see - although there is some questionable coding, it looks like it should work at least as far as running and calling back to the workflow. Without seeing the debug file and/or the rest of the environment (seeing everything in situ) it's difficult to suggest what else to do.

--fish
Senior Consultant, Quotient Inc.
http://www.quotient-inc.com

Dwayne

I believe that the problem is with line 287 of submit.wft:

<command v="C:/iw-home/iw-perl/bin/iwperl C:/iw-home/local/bin/publish_and_deploy_ExternalCommunities.ipl;"/>

That extra semicolon is the problem. Remember, this is a command line, not perl code. It's going to try to execute the perl script named publish_and_deploy_ExternalCommunities.ipl;, which of course doesn't exist. If this were Solaris, it wouldn't be a problem, because semicolon is used to separate commands on one command line. Not so with Windows.

--

Current project: TS 5.5.2/6.1 W2K

Anip

Thanks heaps to both of you for taking the time to go over my code :-)

You were right - it was the semi-colon that was stopping it from working. Removing it fixed the problem in our Teamsite 6 environment, hasn't run in Teamsite 5 yet but I'll get to that shortly.

As is the way with development, I've been pushed onto something else for now but when I get back to this I'll go through and implement your suggestions Fish (such as adding proper success/fail logic to the external task and removing some of the hard-coding) sound advice, thank you.

cheers
Ani