Some users seeing Servlet Exception on page access

[davidljung]

Hello.
I'm new to Alfresco and have setup the Alfresco bundle with Tomcat & MySQL on a fairly vanilla Ubuntu box.  It appeared to be working correctly (aside from a few bugs relating to Flash uploads and image resizing) so I forged ahead and created a wiki, discussions and documents, then users for our development team and sent out invitations.

So far, so good.

However, I've since received several reports of errors upon access to the /share site (both from clicking invitation links and also just via the direct URL).  I can login using the credentials of the users and it works normally for me.  I've tried using FireFox 4, Chrome and Safari on Mac and IE 8 on XP and they all work fine for me.
The users that are unable to access the site are seeing exceptions like those below.  The strange thing is that no exception is logged in either catalina.out or alfresco.log

This one from a user reporting Win XP SP4 and IE:

HTTP Status 500 -

type Exception report

message

description The server encountered an internal error () that prevented it from fulfilling this request.

exception

org.springframework.web.util.NestedServletException: Request processing failed; nested exception is java.lang.NullPointerException
   org.springframework.web.servlet.FrameworkServlet.processRequest(FrameworkServlet.java:659)
   org.springframework.web.servlet.FrameworkServlet.doGet(FrameworkServlet.java:552)
   javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:617)
   javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:717)
   org.alfresco.web.site.servlet.MTAuthenticationFilter.doFilter(MTAuthenticationFilter.java:67)
   org.alfresco.web.site.servlet.SSOAuthenticationFilter.doFilter(SSOAuthenticationFilter.java:301)
root cause

java.lang.NullPointerException
   org.apache.catalina.util.CharsetMapper.getCharset(CharsetMapper.java:106)
   org.apache.catalina.connector.Response.setLocale(Response.java:851)
   org.apache.catalina.connector.ResponseFacade.setLocale(ResponseFacade.java:323)
   org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet.render(DispatcherServlet.java:1035)
   org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet.doDispatch(DispatcherServlet.java:798)
   org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet.doService(DispatcherServlet.java:716)
   org.springframework.web.servlet.FrameworkServlet.processRequest(FrameworkServlet.java:647)
   org.springframework.web.servlet.FrameworkServlet.doGet(FrameworkServlet.java:552)
   javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:617)
   javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:717)
   org.alfresco.web.site.servlet.MTAuthenticationFilter.doFilter(MTAuthenticationFilter.java:67)
   org.alfresco.web.site.servlet.SSOAuthenticationFilter.doFilter(SSOAuthenticationFilter.java:301)
note The full stack trace of the root cause is available in the Apache Tomcat/6.0.26 logs.

Apache Tomcat/6.0.26
‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍

I have seen some reference to this Exception in a post by someone using CURL to access a web-script, but not from anyone using a browser.


This one from a user reporting Win XP and FF 3:

HTTP Status 500 -
type Exception report
message
description The server encountered an internal error () that prevented it from fulfilling this request.
exception
javax.servlet.ServletException: Could not resolve view with name 'user/nathan/dashboard' in servlet with name 'Spring Surf Dispatcher Servlet'
        org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet.render(DispatcherServlet.java:1042)
        org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet.doDispatch(DispatcherServlet.java:798)
        org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet.doService(DispatcherServlet.java:716)
        org.springframework.web.servlet.FrameworkServlet.processRequest(FrameworkServlet.java:647)
        org.springframework.web.servlet.FrameworkServlet.doGet(FrameworkServlet.java:552)
        javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:617)
        javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:717)
        org.alfresco.web.site.servlet.MTAuthenticationFilter.doFilter(MTAuthenticationFilter.java:67)
        org.alfresco.web.site.servlet.SSOAuthenticationFilter.doFilter(SSOAuthenticationFilter.java:301)
note The full stack trace of the root cause is available in the Apache Tomcat/6.0.26 logs.
Apache Tomcat/6.0.26
‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍

All accesses are via HTTPS (I've blocked port 80 on the firewall and changed the Tomcat connector to use 443 and a self-signed cert).

Any help getting these users to be able to use the site would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
-David.

[kevinr]

I've also seen this issue when a "Accept-Language" locale header is missing from the request - and for some reason SpringMVC (which Surf is now part of…) gets very upset if it is missing (you get the same problem from curl - so need to set the same header there also). I wonder if some requests from IE are missing it when running in https (wouldn't be the first IE https bug that's for sure!!). Are you using 3.4? I'm wondering because the MTAuthenticationFilter filter has new code in it to fix this issue and force the setting of an "Accept-Language" header to a value of "en_US" if nothing is set.

Thanks,

Kev

[dsupina]

I have also same error in 3.4a on CentOS when my users try to access Share site from extranet.

org.springframework.web.util.NestedServletException: Request processing failed; nested exception is java.lang.NullPointerException
   org.springframework.web.servlet.FrameworkServlet.processRequest(FrameworkServlet.java:659)
   org.springframework.web.servlet.FrameworkServlet.doGet(FrameworkServlet.java:552)
   javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:697)
   javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:810)
   org.alfresco.web.site.servlet.MTAuthenticationFilter.doFilter(MTAuthenticationFilter.java:67)
   org.alfresco.web.site.servlet.SSOAuthenticationFilter.doFilter(SSOAuthenticationFilter.java:301)
   org.jboss.web.tomcat.filters.ReplyHeaderFilter.doFilter(ReplyHeaderFilter.java:96)
root cause

java.lang.NullPointerException
   org.apache.catalina.util.CharsetMapper.getCharset(CharsetMapper.java:105)
   org.apache.catalina.connector.Response.setLocale(Response.java:813)
   org.apache.catalina.connector.ResponseFacade.setLocale(ResponseFacade.java:320)
   org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet.render(DispatcherServlet.java:1035)
   org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet.doDispatch(DispatcherServlet.java:798)
   org.springframework.web.servlet.DispatcherServlet.doService(DispatcherServlet.java:716)
   org.springframework.web.servlet.FrameworkServlet.processRequest(FrameworkServlet.java:647)
   org.springframework.web.servlet.FrameworkServlet.doGet(FrameworkServlet.java:552)
   javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:697)
   javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:810)
   org.alfresco.web.site.servlet.MTAuthenticationFilter.doFilter(MTAuthenticationFilter.java:67)
   org.alfresco.web.site.servlet.SSOAuthenticationFilter.doFilter(SSOAuthenticationFilter.java:301)
   org.jboss.web.tomcat.filters.ReplyHeaderFilter.doFilter(ReplyHeaderFilter.java:96)
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[kevinr]

Thank you for confirming this, we'll take a look.

Kev

[kevinr]

Hi,

From what I can see in the code, this has been fixed for 3.4.b! The second 3.4 community release is due out today. So look out for posts/download locations shortly.

Kev