No output pages are generated in one specific server

fybirtxchg

We are developing a WEB application, which uses BIRT 2.3.2 as its report engine. The application builds its own JSP pages to show reports generated by BIRT, i.e., the report viewer by BIRT is not used by the application.

Everything worked perfectly until recently we made a change to put the intermediate report documents and HTML (and other format of) report pages in separate directories. Doing so is to avoid clogging the file system that host the application with huge engine output files.

The problem is that when a report is triggered to run, the intermediate report document is generated in the designated directory, but the report pages are not. The directory is supposed to be created in the context of the application. It leads up to error 404 on the browser.

The strange thing is it happens only on one specific machine. We tested it on various environments including one similar to the problem one. They all worked. When we switched the problem machine back with previous version of the application, it worked again. Both version use the same version of BIRT. Ever more strange, no error messages showing in the log files. I tried all means I am aware to find the cause. It simply beats me flat.

Following is the environment the application is running in.

OS: MS Windows Server 2008 (64bit)
WEB server: Apache Tomcat 5.5.27 (as a Windows service)
JVM: JDK 1.5.0_x
DBMS: MS SQL Server 2005
BIRT runtime: 2.3.2

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Feng

fybirtxchg

All,

I found the cause of this problem. It has nothing to do with BIRT.

In my application, I use URI and URL to convert platform specific resources, such as file paths. When a path name contains spaces, URL encodes the name. Its getPath method returns encoded string. When this string is passed to BIRT which in turn passes it to the OS to process the file. In this case, space is encoded with '%20'. A path of encoded string is created and the output pages are stored there instead of intended place under the context of the WEB server. You will see no exceptions and errors.

Although it is not related to BIRT, hope that it may help somebody with similar problem.

Feng