Troubleshooting

This section provides some tips for troubleshooting problems that you think are associated with the Web client. When troubleshooting the Web client, you should also see the "Web client problem determination" chapter in the WebSphere MQ Workflow Installation Guide.

The following troubleshooting resources normally contain all the information you should need to determine the cause of a problem. In case you cannot solve the problem yourself, the WebSphere MQ Workflow support team will request the information of these resources for problem determination.

For troubleshooting tips for the Web client, and associated information about gathering troubleshooting resources, see the following sections:

Client to application server communication

The first potential problem area is the communication from the client devices to the HTTP server and to the application server.

The following steps can be made to find out if a problem is located in this area:

  1. Make sure that they clients can access the web application server machine via the network (ping the application server)
  2. Make sure the HTTP server is running and accessible from the client browsers (use URL http://<hostname>:<portnumber>)
  3. If the HTTP server can be reached from the clients try the URL for the Web Client servlet (http://<hostname>:<port>/MQWFClient-<CfgID>/RTC.html)

If the logon page is displayed, the client - application server communication can be considered to be working correctly.

If you can access the HTTP server, but can not display the logon page, check if the application server is running. If the application server is running check if the Root-URI for the Web Client servlet is the same that you tried (/MQWFClient-<CfgID>). With WebSphere Application server you can use the Administration console to check that setting.

Application server to WebSphere MQ communication

After you have access to the Web client logon page, the next step is to establish a communication link to the Workflow servers. Try to use the Web client to log on to MQ Workflow.

You might receive one or more of the following error messages for problems with application server to WebSphere MQ communication:

Check the WebSphere MQ documentation for details on which libraries and jar files are required for the installed version of WebSphere MQ.

You might want to try the Java HelloApplication from the MQ Workflow samples to connect to the Workflow system. If you can not connect from the Web Client, but a logon with the HelloApplication is possible, you should check the environment settings of the application server.

If the test with the HelloApplication also fails, you could try to use the administration utility of MQ Workflow to try to establish a connection. If fmcautil works, the problem is obviously Java related.

Application server to Workflow server communication

To determine if an error is located in the communication link between application server and the Workflow server follow these steps:

  1. Test the physical connection between the application server and the workflow server. Use ping to check TCP communication capabilities in both directions.
  2. Check if the Repository Queue Managers of the MQ cluster and the other queue managers in the cluster are running.
  3. Check if the queue manager of the application server is known in the cluster repository and is in state active running.

    On Windows you can use the WebSphere MQ Explorer to test this on the cluster repository machine. On Unix use the appropriate commands in the mq command console. For details about testing WebSphere MQ, see the WebSphere MQ documentation.

  4. Check the WebSphere MQ error logs for descriptions of (potential) reasons for MQ communication failures. The eror logs are located in the WebSphere MQ installation directory under errors for general errors and for errors of a single queue manager they can be found in the qmgrs/<Queuemanagername>/errors subdirectory.

MQ Workflow to database communication

Problems of the MQ Workflow server are best determined by gathering further information by the MQ Workflow trace facility. For details about using the trace facility for Web client problems, see the "Web client problem determination" chapter and other problem determination chapters in the MQ Workflow Installation Guide.

You can also use the checker utility fmczchk to gather information on installed and configured components. Run 'fmczchk -d -y<CfgID>' from a Command line.

Typical problems include a changed password for the user ID accessing the database or a user ID or password that exceed the 8 character limit of the database.