In setting up Oracle’s Primavera P6 EPPM version 18.8, I discovered that users who connected to the client via Citrix were not picking up changes that were made to the default configuration file.
Normally, if that file is changed and is newer than the user’s own file, it will be overwritten with the default. In this case, users were not seeing the newer file, and when I looked, they often had no local profile on the Citrix server.
As it turned out, the user profiles were set up as roaming profiles that were deleted upon logoff. This wouldn’t necessarily be a problem, except that the their copy of the config file was always listed as newer than the default.
A workaround was to be logged into the server via RDP, and to have the user log in via Citrix. At that time, the config file could be manually copied, overwriting the user’s old file, and then (most importantly!) manually opening and saving the user’s file, so that it would remain in place in their roaming profile even after logoff.
This is clearly not a feasible practice in a production environment. However, an automated script that does this could solve this problem! Save the following as a .cmd file and make sure it is run prior to running the P6 client executable.
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.
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:
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.