404 not found when combining CWA 2011 + Experience Manager for Tridion 2011 SP1 HR1

Question

We are trying to set up Experience Manager in Tridion 2011 SP1 but we are facing some issues.

All works perfectly on a simple web site: basic Java based Content Delivery Web site or Static Web Site (in this case the Session Preview is disabled)

But when we are trying to combine it with a web site based on CWA 2011 some issues are encountered. When editing, if we click for example on the button "Update Preview" then we are facing a 404 Page not Found error.

The installation manual is talking about this kind of errors (chapter 6.4 Preventing 404 errors on your staging Web site) and is recommanding to create a blank file se_blank.html . We did it but we still have 404 errors.

Answer 1

Session Preview does not work with CWA 2011.

Hope this helps not losing more time.

Cheers.

Answer 2

CWA should not interfere with XPM's functionality.

So first off have a look at the Session Preview Webservice log and your website's log. You should see errors related to the 404 showing there. There are a number of things that could contribute to this, including network security settings. If you share your logs here, we can help further.

Also, Nuno provided excellent insight into the sequence of actions when session preview is triggered. It's important to understand these steps to be able to effectively debug the error. Here is the link: https://stackoverflow.com/a/10802033/1284894

Answer 3

I confirm that the pb is due to the Session Preview.

First, in fact the 404 error was a 500 one... The error was not properly catched on our side and a wrong error code was returned.

Then concerning the 500. This 500 is raised by the CWA when it tries to find metadata for the page.

This error seems to occur in the following case :

• The claimstore try to retrieve information. A PreviewSession is found --> No Pb
• From this session, the system seems to be able to test/retrieve/merge information (for ex CPs are correctly retrieved) --> The PageContentFilter works perfectly

After that the request is dispatched to the Entrance servlet and here an error occures when trying to retrieve Page metadata. An id is added to the page filename and the CWA is no more able to retrieve this path from the Broker DB.

Ex with a request to /app-test/en/index.html :

...
2013-04-04 18:20:02,759 DEBUG MethodHandlerUtils - Calling method 'findByPageURL' of the original DAO.
2013-04-04 18:20:03,337 DEBUG SessionManagerImpl - Activity on session: db436f57-d8b0-4ce3-8d2d-8dc08da3216d, extending session lifetime until: Thu Apr 04 18:22:03 CEST 2013.
2013-04-04 18:20:03,337 DEBUG JPAPreviewSessionDAO - Retrieving PreviewSession by sessionId: db436f57-d8b0-4ce3-8d2d-8dc08da3216d
2013-04-04 18:20:03,337 DEBUG SessionServiceImpl - PreviewSession already exists, updating with PreviewSession [sessionId=db436f57-d8b0-4ce3-8d2d-8dc08da3216d, expirationDate=Thu Apr 04 18:22:03 CEST 2013]
2013-04-04 18:20:03,337 DEBUG JPAPreviewSessionDAO - Updating PreviewSession: PreviewSession [sessionId=db436f57-d8b0-4ce3-8d2d-8dc08da3216d, expirationDate=Thu Apr 04 18:22:03 CEST 2013]
2013-04-04 18:20:03,368 WARN  BrokerUtils - BrokerUtils.getPageMetaByURL: Cannot find PageMeta in Tridion. Returning null.
2013-04-04 18:20:03,368 DEBUG CWAPageMetaFactory - CWAPageMetaFactory.getMetaByURL: Could not find PageMeta for URL '/apptest/en/index_db436f57-d8b0-4ce3-8d2d-8dc08da3216d.html'
2013-04-04 18:20:03,368 DEBUG Entrance - Entrance.getLastModified: Returning -1
2013-04-04 18:20:03,368 DEBUG Entrance - Entrance.getLastModified: Finished getLastModified in 609ms