Portal, Express Beta Version 6.1 Operating systems: i5/OS, Linux,Windows

Troubleshooting WSRP

In case of problems you can troubleshoot WSRP in IBM^® WebSphere^® Portal Express in different ways.

• Set traces and using the portal run-time log file for WSRP diagnosis
• Debugging and Monitoring the WSRP protocol flow
• Monitoring WSRP messages between the Consumer and Producer by using TCPMon
• Parallel portlet rendering with remote portlets

Set traces and using the portal run-time log file for WSRP diagnosis

If you want to diagnose problems that might occur during the use of WSRP, you can set WSRP specific traces and enable run-time logs for the Consumer, Producer, and administration components of the WSRP implementation. Use the administration portlet Enable Tracing.

You can enable the following trace loggers for the WSRP implementation:

Debugging and Monitoring the WSRP protocol flow

You can trace SOAP messages that are exchanged between a WSRP Consumer and a WSRP Producer by using a monitor or sniffer application to capture network traffic between the two points. Most UNIX or Linux operating systems provide such utilities, for example, tcpdump, which can be run on either side and record network traffic captured by a network interface. There are also free tools available. Another alternative is to use the utility TCPMon that is shipped with the WebSphere Application Server.

Monitoring WSRP messages between the Consumer and Producer by using TCPMon

You can use the TCPMon tool to monitor the WSRP messages between the Consumer and Producer, as described in the WebSphere Application Server Information Center topic about Tracing Web services messages. The TCPMon application uses the man-in-the-middle approach. TCPMon listens on a TCP port, logs the HTTP or SOAP traffic, and forwards the request to the designated server and TCP port. Therefore you need to redirect the communication from the Consumer to the TCPMon application and let TCPMon forward the request to the WSRP Producer.

If you have an existing integrated Producer configuration on your Consumer portal, you can modify the host and port for each WSRP port URL that you want to monitor. To change the WSRP port URLs that the Consumer uses to communicate with the integrated Producer, you can either use the portal administration user interface or the XML configuration interface.

Alternatively, to debug a certain scenario, you can also create a new Producer definition on the Consumer with a WSDL that contains WSRP port URLs that point to the TCPMon host und port.

The portal allows you to manipulate the WSDL contents by adding URL parameters to the WSDL URL. For details about how to do this, refer to .

After you have redirected the traffic, configure the TCPMon tool to listen on the port that you have specified on the Consumer side to communicate with the Producer. Also, set the target port to the actual port values of the Producer WSRP interfaces. For the IBM WebSphere Portal Express Producer, these are the ports that appear in the WSDL file when you request the WSDL without the port parameter.

• Linux: java -Djava.ext.dirs=$WAS_EXT_DIRS;$app_server_root%/plugins com.ibm.ws.webservices.engine.utils.tcpmon listenOnPort targetHost targetPort
• i5/OS: java -Djava.ext.dirs=$WAS_EXT_DIRS;$app_server_root%/plugins com.ibm.ws.webservices.engine.utils.tcpmon listenOnPort targetHost targetPort
• Windows:java -Djava.ext.dirs=$WAS_EXT_DIRS;$app_server_root%\plugins com.ibm.ws.webservices.engine.utils.tcpmon listenOnPort targetHost targetPort

Parallel portlet rendering with remote portlets

If you encounter errors with parallel portlet rendering of remote portlets in your Consumer portal, try to improve this situation by further increasing the value of the timeout parameter parallelRenderingTimeOut beyond the value of 10000 given further above. For details about parallel portlet rendering with remote portlets, refer to Parallel portlet rendering.