I previously wrote a post about getting the error “ptcommonobj is undefined” in the web browser and having modal windows, search look-ups, and other things not working in PeopleSoft. Well not so long ago this struck me again. This time though no PeopleTools upgrades had occurred and there was no proxy or caching devices between the users and weblogic. But I was still stuck with things not working and after seeing the javascript error notification in IE I found my old friend ptcommonobj is undefined.
What happened was essentially an unanticipated change to the web profile. This was a non production environment that had been working fine. It had just been refreshed from production. I found it was set to use the default DEV web profile (no big deal in and of itself). Something however had gone wrong with the refresh and it had only completed 97% or so. Of the tasks that failed to occur was the preserving of the web profile configuration. The settings for DEV were copied from PROD down to DEV. The settings in the PROD database for the DEV web profile had “Show StyleSheet Inline HTML” and “Show JavaScript Inline HTML” turned on (for some PeopleTools releases I believe these were delivered on by default for this profile). When these settings came down to an environment using that web profile it broke that environment however because they had turned been off previously.
Starting with PeopleTools 8.50 PeopleSoft (Oracle) no longer supports enabling these options and as you can see it can actually break things. They have removed the “Show JavaScript Inline HTML” completely from the web profile as of 8.52, however “Show StyleSheet Inline HTML” is still there.
To verify your settings log into PeopleSoft and check the web profile your using. Navigate to:
Main Menu -> PeopleTools -> Web Profile -> Web Profile Configuration (granted, if your having this problem, the search option may not work 🙂 ) Once you select your current web profile check the Debugging tab. If you can’t actually get to your web profile and you were using the DEV one, try changing it in configuration.properties on your web server to use PROD and restart, or you can use SQL to update this, but I don’t have that SQL handy at the moment, perhaps I’ll add it later.
Normally this change requires a restart to take effect, however you can use the reloadconfig command to do it with out a restart if you have that setup. I’ll cover that trick in another post though.
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