This page includes general steps for troubleshooting an Aptify Web or e-Business 6 site issue. Checklist for basic Aptify Web/e-Business 6 troubleshooting
Below is a real use case of applying those steps to resolve an issue where neither Aptify Web nor e-Business 6 would load.
Problem
We deployed the Aptify Web and e-Business 6 websites for CAI on a new sandbox server running Windows 2019. This was done by copying the sites instead of running through the installers. However, neither site would start due to various issues.
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- When setting up a new server, you may want to use the installers instead of just copying the site. The installers would have pointed out problems logging in as the App Pool User, the fact that SSRS Reports and MVC4 were both missing, etc. Note, all these steps are accounted for in the previous documentation
- Check the Event Viewer of the web server and the CheckConnection endpoint of both sites, they will both give a lot of information.
Aptify Web troubleshooting steps
The first thing to check is the Services CheckConnection endpoint. This just tells you whether the basics of the site can initialize. In our case, we got a HTTP 503 unavailable response from https://aptify.sandbox19.charteredaccountants.ie:444/AptifyServicesAPI/services/checkconnection.
If that's the case, usually it means services cannot start at all. The next two places to check are IIS specifically the Application Pools and the Event Viewer. In IIS, we noticed immediately that both SOA App Pools (one powering Aptify Web SOA and the other, e-Business 6 SOA) were stopped:
We attempted to manually start the Aptify_SOAWeb app pool, but it would immediately stop as soon as we started it. Going into the Event Viewer logs of the web server, we saw these issues:
So the first problem is that the Application Pools cannot login to Aptify. In this case, we are using mirrored accounts for a DMZ or non-domain setup, so we have an Aptify_1 user on the web server mimicking the Aptify_1 user on the DB server. This link describes how to setup these accounts to work: 325152475970 (One important item is they MUST have the same password)
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Aptify will display the mirrored account on the DB server as the login. |
We then went back into IIS and attempted to manually start the App Pool. It still stopped. One common thing to test here is to re-enter the App Pool credentials. So we right-clicked on the App Pool, clicked Advanced Settings, clicked Identity, and attempted to re-enter the username and password. It worked, although when we clicked OK, we got an error "Value does not fall within the expected range."
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We then went back into IIS and re-entered the Application Pool usernames and password. This time, it allowed us to save. We then started IIS back up and confirmed the Application Pools started and stayed running. Now, we went back to our CheckConnection endpoint.
It gave us this error:
This is a straightforward error telling us we do not have SQL Server Report viewer installed on this server, which is a requirement for Aptify Web. We first installed the Report Viewer's pre-requisite, SQLSysCLRTypes_64bit.msi, then ReportViewer_64bit.msi:
We then went back to our CheckConnection endpoint again. This time, we saw a different error:
Could not load file or assembly 'Microsoft.Web.Infrastructure, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified.
You can find this by googling the missing assembly, but we'd observed this previously. This means that MVC4 is not installed on this Web Server, also an Aptify Web pre-requisite. We installed it and went back to the CheckConnection endpoint. It now loaded, which means we can check the Aptify site:
The Aptify site loaded until we got to the select login method screen, whether we chose Domain or SQL, it did nothing. Reloading the page with the Chrome Console open (F12) we saw we were getting a 500 internal server error on either the SQL or Domain login pages. Fortunately, we'd seen this before too when transferring websites, and the resolution is the Anonymous Authentication identity for our site must be the app pool user.
Selecting our website in IIS and clicking Authentication, we then selected Anonymous Authentication and the Edit button in the far right corner.
It showed us that the Anonymous identity our site was trying to use was Specific User, IUSR. Both Aptify Web and E-Business 6 require it to be set to the Application pool identity. We changed it for both sites and restarted IIS.
After that, we confirmed the CheckConnection endpoint was still working, and attempted to login again. Now both the SQL and Domain pages would load, and we were able to get into Aptify Web:
e-Business 6 troubleshooting steps
During the Aptify Web troubleshooting, we had already resolved the login issue for the E-Business App Pool user (in this environment, it is same as Aptify Web SOA) we'd already changed the Anonymous Authentication to the App Pool user, and resolved issues with our ApplicationHost.config file. After that, we tried the E-Business 6 Check Connection endpoint.
In our case, we got a HTTP 503 unavailable response from the site. Going back to IIS, we looked at the Application Pools and noticed Aptify_EbusinessSOAWeb was still stopped, though the same user was running Aptify_SOAWeb fine:
Previously, once we resolved the ApplicationHost.config issue, we'd re-entered the Aptify_SOAWeb username/password but had not done so on the E-business 6 app pool. We did so and started it up, and it remained running.
We returned to our CheckConnection endpoint and it successfully resolved:
However, when we went to the UI site, the UI elements loaded, but the SOA items did not. This can be seen if you go to the UI site and it never loads the blue e-Business 6.0 banner at the top, like this:
Opening our Chrome Console (F12) and reloading the page, we saw an error calling the ShoppingCarts page at the very bottom right:
It didn't tell us much, so we checked the web server's Event Viewer. This gave us the answer. There were 4-5 exceptions similar to this, all with one critical error highlighted in red below:
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This means either e-Business 6 could not access C:\Program Files\Aptify 5.0\Bootfiles\IAptifyDataServices.dll due to permissions issues or something, or it doesn't exist. In our case, it did not exist. This new server had the Aptify desktop client setup under the Aptify 6.1 folder, but our site was still looking for Aptify 5.0:
We simply copied the Aptify 6.1 folder and renamed it Aptify 5.0, and then restarted IIS. Now, our ShoppingCart endpoint loaded fine and our SOA loaded the menu properly:
