404 errors in ATG Portal

2006-12-02 14:04:36  |  #  |  comments [0]
Students who take the ATG Portal course often have serious problems tracking down and solving 404 errors in portal pages: as the portal works by dynamically including many JSP fragments, there may be multiple concurring causes for those errors and few of them have to do with an true typing mistake of an include tag. I use the following checklist to solve those problems:
  1. look in the http://localhost:8840/nucleus/atg/dynamo/service/j2ee/J2EEContainer/ component to see if the portlet webapp is correctly started; if the portlet is not there, edit its J2EEContainer.properties file and add it, like 
    applications+={atg.dynamo.root}/MyPortlets/j2ee-apps/myportlet_war
  2. check the portlet.xml file for any typos in the JSP mode mappings, re-run the portletDeployTool script and redeploy the portlet
  3. check the dynamoJ2EESpecifier.xml file to see if there is a web-application-mapping for the portlet webapp, if not then add it
  4. check the web.xml and the dynamoJ2EESpecifier.xml file again to see if all the taglibs have the correct definitions
In my experience, the most critical step is the third one: if the J2EE container does not know where to map requests for your portlet, it will always reply with a 404 error. A great improvement would be having in the error page the full path of the target file, that is the path to the file that was supposed to be included: I really do not want to enable debugging on the FileFinderServlet yet another time...
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