Deep in the Code

I am currently in the process of setting up an Oracle Primavera P6 EPPM 18.8 environment. The operating system on the application and Web server is Windows Server 2012 R2, the middleware is Oracle WebLogic 12c, and Oracle Database 12c for the RDBMS.

This is the first time I’ve ever set up P6 from scratch, and I’m doing it without any assistance from Oracle, other than their documentation.

I’ve learned quite a lot in my adventure so far. One thing that I learned is that you REALLY don’t want to turn on LDAP Authentication everywhere until you’re sure it’s working.

(Relevant documentation: Configuring LDAP Settings in the Primavera P6 Administrator)

In the P6 Administration website, there are two places to change the type of authentication used: NATIVE, LDAP, and WebSSO. The Authentication tab:

And the authentication section on the database instance itself:

If both are set to “LDAP” (and presumably “WebSSO” as well) when things aren’t yet set up properly, you’ll get this lovely error: “Primavera P6 was configured to use a different authentication mode than the database selected”.

Google suggests that you read this Oracle doc to fix the problem. However, this problem is only fixed with this solution if only the DB instance setting is “LDAP”. If both are set that way, this solution does not fix the problem – though it should still be run so as to fix the setting on the DB instance page.

After poking around in the database, I discovered that the offending configuration setting was stored in a BLOB in the ADMIN_CONFIG table. Unfortunately, editing this BLOB is not easy without some assistance. Fortunately, I found an article on StackOverflow that had functions for converting a BLOB into a CLOB, at which point the REPLACE function could be used. Then convert the CLOB back to a BLOB, and UPDATE the database table.

First, create the two conversion functions:

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION convert_to_clob(l_blob BLOB) RETURN CLOB IS
      l_clob         CLOB;
      l_dest_offset  NUMBER := 1;
      l_src_offset   NUMBER := 1;
      l_lang_context NUMBER := dbms_lob.default_lang_ctx;
      l_warning      NUMBER;
   BEGIN
      dbms_lob.createtemporary(l_clob, TRUE);
      dbms_lob.converttoclob(dest_lob     => l_clob,
                             src_blob     => l_blob,
                             amount       => dbms_lob.lobmaxsize,
                             dest_offset  => l_dest_offset,
                             src_offset   => l_src_offset,
                             blob_csid    => nls_charset_id('AL32UTF8'),
                             lang_context => l_lang_context,
                             warning      => l_warning);
      RETURN l_clob;
   END convert_to_clob;
   /

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION convert_to_blob(l_clob CLOB) RETURN BLOB IS
      l_blob         BLOB;
      l_dest_offset  NUMBER := 1;
      l_src_offset   NUMBER := 1;
      l_lang_context NUMBER := dbms_lob.default_lang_ctx;
      l_warning      NUMBER;
   BEGIN
      dbms_lob.createtemporary(l_blob, TRUE);
      dbms_lob.converttoblob(dest_lob     => l_blob,
                             src_clob     => l_clob,
                             amount       => dbms_lob.lobmaxsize,
                             dest_offset  => l_dest_offset,
                             src_offset   => l_src_offset,
                             blob_csid    => nls_charset_id('AL32UTF8'),
                             lang_context => l_lang_context,
                             warning      => l_warning);
      RETURN l_blob;
   END convert_to_blob;
   /

Then run an UPDATE statement, something like this, changing the CONFIG_NAME appropriately:

UPDATE ADMIN_CONFIG
     SET CONFIG_DATA = convert_to_blob(
                          REPLACE(convert_to_clob(CONFIG_DATA),
                                 '<mode desc="SET_AUTHENTICATION_MODE" o1="NATIVE" o2="WebSSO" o3="LDAP" type="javax.swing.JComboBox">LDAP</mode>',
                                 '<mode desc="SET_AUTHENTICATION_MODE" o1="NATIVE" o2="WebSSO" o3="LDAP" type="javax.swing.JComboBox">NATIVE</mode>')
                          )
   WHERE CONFIG_NAME = 'myprimavera.bre.YourConfigName';
COMMIT;

After running this script and restarting the application servers, you should once again be back in NATIVE mode and able to get back into P6 to see what went wrong, and no longer crying over the website you thought you had bricked just a few minutes prior.