Version 9.0 Early Access Release (EAR) Causes Deployment to Fail

Joe Smith · January 12, 2011

The information in this article applies to:

Product: Metastorm BPM
Version: 9.0.x

Issue

A project fails to deploy, and an error message similar to the following is written to the Windows event viewer:

Fatal -> System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object. at Metastorm.Deployment.Core.DeploymentService.DoDeploy(IEntity rootEntity, IEnumerable\`1 entities) at Metastorm.Deployment.Core.DeploymentService.Deploy(IEntity root, IEnumerable\`1 entities) -> 1/10/2011 3:33:33 AM

This can occur if a Service Release (SR) is installed on top of the Metastorm BPM Version 9.0 EAR (Early Access Release).

To determine if the Early Access Release was installed:
1. Go to the installing user's %Temp% folder, for example C:\\Documents and Settings\\Administrator\\Local Settings\\Temp.
2. Open the file MetastormBPM9.0Log.txt.
3. Search for ARPCOMMENTS.
4. If this says Build 329 - Early Access Release, the base installation is the EAR. If it says Build 357, it's the GA release.
Assuming the EAR was installed, uninstall Metastorm BPM, install the version 9.0 GA release, and then install the latest Service Release. These can be downloaded from the Metastorm Customer Zone, which is accessible through Metastorm Community Central (MC2).