Workflow Status Monitor Diagram Issue

Problem: Users reported issues with the view workflow status diagram functionality. When we use the Order Entry module and open up an order and try to see the workflow status diagram, an error page would be displayed stating something like "An unexpected error occured. Please get in touch with your system administrator".

solution:

First of all, we wanted to isolate the issue. So we enabled the FND: Diagnostics profile option to Yes. This will create "Click here" link which will provide you the details about the error. This in our case generated an error stack, with nullpointerexception.

Part of the error stack was as follows:

java.lang.NullPointerException at java.util.Hashtable.get(Hashtable.java:315) at oracle.apps.fnd.util.OracleTimezone.getTimezoneNameFromCode(OracleTimezone.java:171) at oracle.apps.fnd.framework.OANLSServices.getTimezoneName(OANLSServices.java:1635) at oracle.apps.fnd.wf.monitor.webui.GraphMonitorCO.processRequest(GraphMonitorCO.java:107) at oracle.apps.fnd.framework.webui.OAWebBeanHelper.processRequest(OAWebBeanHelper.java:581)

One of the notes suggested to set Server Timezone profile option and test the problem. We on the contrary unset the client timezone profile option which some users had set at the user level. This helped our case.

In this particular case users unknowingly had set these profile options. What I mean by that is - this profile option was set at the background when the users updated their preferences in the Home Page (in Framework Only mode). One of the preferences available is to set the timezone.

In any case, what we figured out in our encounter with this issue was that, once any of the users who have this client timezone set accessed the application, the application would misbehave and throw errors to all other users who do not have this parameter set as well. The other symptom of this issue was that users would click on OA Framework based responsibilities but the menus/navigation page would not load.

So, eventually, the right thing to do is to set the Server Timezone so that even if users set the client timezone, we should be OK. Besides, we have little control over the client timezone profile option, unless we take care of this in one of the following two ways:

1. Make the client timezone preference unavailable / unupdatable from the OA Framework perspective

2. Make the client timezone profile option unupdatable from the conventional profile option setting screen.

- Aravind Kamath