topic Re: Activiti REST after restart in Alfresco Archive

Activiti REST after restart

hbacanak — Wed, 18 Feb 2015 09:52:13 GMT

Hi,I am deploying activiti-rest(5.17.0) war on tomcat (8.0.9) and postgresql(9.3.5). However it only works for the first time. After i restart tomcat i get 404. What i changed:activiti-rest\WEB-INF\classes\db.propertiesdb=pgsqljdbc.driver=org.postgresql.Driverjdbc.url=jdbcostgresql://localhost:543

Re: Activiti REST after restart

jbarrez — Wed, 18 Feb 2015 16:49:43 GMT

This sounds very strange. Are you sure the data is in your postgres database?

Re: Activiti REST after restart

hbacanak — Thu, 19 Feb 2015 11:33:27 GMT

Hello Joram, your response is much appreciated. Database seems to be fine (all tables and data present, for example three demo users in the act_id_user table). I used following steps, may be i am missing some required step.

The critical portion of the log file seems to be
—-
org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContext.startInternal Error listenerStart
org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContext.startInternal Context [/activiti-rest] startup failed due to previous errors
org.activiti.rest.servlet.WebConfigurer - Destroying Web application
—-
yet it is cryptic to me and does not says much about the reason of the error.

First deployment
1 Expand activiti-rest.war to a directory x
2 Make db.properties changes
3 Add postgresql driver
4 Move activiti-rest folder to tomcat webapps
5 catalina.bat run > first_run.log 2>&1
log results are in the first_run file(attachment)
http://localhost:8080/activiti-rest/service/identity/users responds as expected.
6 ctrl-c to stop tomcat

Second deployment
1 make changes to engine.properties at to prevent database initialization & data generation at x/activiti-rest
2 delete existing activiti-rest webapp
3 copy modified x/activiti-rest to tomcat webapps
4 catalina.bat run > second_run.log 2>&1
log results are in the second_run file(attachment)
http://localhost:8080/activiti-rest/service/identity/users returns 404
5 stop tomcat

Re: Activiti REST after restart

hbacanak — Thu, 19 Feb 2015 14:21:56 GMT

btw, exactly the same thing happening with activiti-explorer. also attached logs.

Re: Activiti REST after restart

hbacanak — Fri, 20 Feb 2015 07:24:42 GMT

i changed the logging to debug mode. On the second run
if I turn off schema update it says Tables missing for component(s) engine, history, identity. Tables are there and seems to be populated.
if I recover engine.properties to original state and deploy again the third time
it gives table alredy exist errors as expected like ‘ERROR: relation "act_ge_property" already exists’

Re: Activiti REST after restart

trademak — Tue, 24 Feb 2015 20:22:29 GMT

The db property in db.properties seems to have a wrong value. It should have postgres as value.

Best regards,

Re: Activiti REST after restart

hbacanak — Wed, 25 Feb 2015 09:22:52 GMT

Hello Tijs, thank you for your response.
I applied your suggestion with clean install and outcome did not change.
I also updated the tool chain(apache, jdk, postgresql) to latest versions and it didn't make difference either.

Re: Activiti REST after restart

hbacanak — Wed, 25 Feb 2015 13:44:20 GMT

ok. the problem seems to be locales.

at catalina.bat changing
set "JAVA_OPTS=%JAVA_OPTS% %LOGGING_MANAGER% "
to
set "JAVA_OPTS=%JAVA_OPTS% %LOGGING_MANAGER% -Duser.language=en -Duser.region=US"
corrected the problem.

table names distorted during application lifecycle(eg tablename.toLowerCase()). In my humble opinion, locales should be handled more gracefully.

Re: Activiti REST after restart

jbarrez — Sat, 28 Feb 2015 09:34:06 GMT

> In my humble opinion, locales should be handled more gracefully.

How? We are assuming UTF8 for all our code to cover as most as languages as possible. Checking the locale wont help for that.

Re: Activiti REST after restart

hbacanak — Mon, 02 Mar 2015 12:33:07 GMT

My System:
System.out.println(Charset.defaultCharset().toString()); //prints windows-1254
System.out.println(Locale.getDefault()); // prints tr_TR

Problem Example:
—
public class LocaleTester {
private String tableName="HI";
@Test
public void toLowercaseTest(){
    assertEquals("hi", tableName.toLowerCase());
}
@Test
public void toLowercaseTestWithUsLocale(){
    assertEquals("hi", tableName.toLowerCase(new Locale("en", "US")));
}

@Test
public void toLowercaseTestWithTrLocale(){
    assertEquals("hi", tableName.toLowerCase(new Locale("tr", "TR")));
}
}
—
toLowercaseTestWithUsLocale passes,
toLowercaseTest & toLowercaseTestWithTrLocale fails:
—
expected: <h > but was: <h[ı] >
Expected :hi
Actual   :hı
—
The root of the problem:
Upper case / lower case character mapping is not compatible with English for example:
English
Uppercase - Lowercase
I - i

Turkish
Uppercase - Lowercase
I - ı
İ - i

—
so on the second run, when you search for a table named tablename.toLowerCase() it cannot find the table if it contains a variant of characters that has different mappings than english counterpart.
(I believe) the problem I encountered is only relevant in table name conversions. When I changed tomcat locale to English the problem solved. (Although it is not really a solution because this will bring other problems). Also I didn’t explore full extend of locale problems. My solution proposal is to change tablename.toLowerCase() to tablename.toLowerCase(englishLocale). Of course I may not be aware of different impacts this will cause.

Re: Activiti REST after restart

jbarrez — Tue, 03 Mar 2015 17:11:12 GMT

So basically you say you've got two ways of uppercasing the same character? First time in my life I heard that

But I don't see how this could be solved for everything: if the JDK and Tomcat are both on the same locale, shouldn't it do what the locale says? So you also say that the JDK is wrong?

Re: Activiti REST after restart

hbacanak — Wed, 04 Mar 2015 08:22:11 GMT

> So basically you say you've got two ways of uppercasing the same character? First time in my life I heard that smiley
Hehe, we are accustomed to it, problematic at every platform smiley. Just to be clear we don’t have two ways of uppercasing the same letter, we have 2 different letters for english letter ‘i’ (approximately). When you lowercase ‘I’, in english you have ‘i’, in turkish you have ‘ı’.

> But I don't see how this could be solved for everything: if the JDK and Tomcat are both on the same locale, shouldn't it do what the locale says? So you also say that the JDK is wrong?

No JDK is not wrong and handles this correctly. If you run the problem example, it will fail only toLowercaseTestWithTrLocale() if you have english locale; both toLowercaseTestWithTrLocale and toLowercaseTest() will fail if you have turkish locale.So when i run tomcat, it defaults to turkish locale and behaves as expected, which breaks your assumption about lower cased table name.
That being said, it will not be problem for us i guess. We plan to use a customized standalone activiti engine which can live in an english locale happily ever after.

The net impact of this problem:
1- Activiti modules will not work out of the box, if you are using a locale with incompatible character mapping, the error is hard to track down
2- You can not run multiple applications in the same tomcat instance with activiti if you need your default locale.

Optimal solution would be changing
—
if ("postgres".equals(databaseType)) {
tableName = tableName.toLowerCase();
}
—
To
if ("postgres".equals(databaseType)) {
tableName = tableName.toLowerCase(englishLocale);
}
At
https://github.com/Activiti/Activiti/blob/master/modules/activiti-engine/src/main/java/org/activiti/engine/impl/db/DbSqlSession.java#L1093

This way assumptions about lowercased table names will hold regardless of default locales.

Re: Activiti REST after restart

trademak — Wed, 04 Mar 2015 15:13:57 GMT

Interesting, would you be willing to provide a pull request for this, since you can make sure it works in your environment?

Best regards,

Re: Activiti REST after restart

hbacanak — Thu, 05 Mar 2015 08:37:02 GMT

ok, i will look into it. have a nice day.