Question

Lost the ability to access a form with the forms designer - ever happened to anyone else?

Self-Hosted Forms Layout Designer

Updated one day ago

asked two days ago

Has anyone ever lost the ability to load their form in the Self Hosted version of Laserfiche. I am asking because this is the first time (supporting hundreds of systems) this has ever occurred and I can not seem to figure it out.

Essentially one day the customer noticed one of their long time forms would not open in the designer. The business process opens, you can start the process, and the process still works. You simply can not edit the form.

All you see is the loading gif and it never loads the form. We even tried a 4 hour test to see if it ever loads.

So far I have tried copying the form, copying the process, exporting and importing the process, and sending the process export to Laserfiche support for guidance.

The only thing that works is if I spin up a from scratch server environment on a VM, I can import the form and load it up. But it seems overkill to re-install the entire environment because just 1 form will not load.

All the other forms load in a very large system.

I can not find another case similar to this.

We are on an updated version as well in the environment

12.0.2410.345

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Replies

replied two days ago

Haven't seen this - but possible idea for testing...

Have you checked the browser console while you are trying to open the form in the designer?

Maybe there is some error happening with the loading process that is causing it to fail, even though it looks like it's still trying to load.

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replied two days ago

There is an error in the console, I will post a screenshot below. I verified the vendor.js file is not missing and I can open it with notepad when I first saw this. Maybe the customer accessed a feature that uses a function from this code file and the file has a object reference management issue, I am not sure how I would follow that trail back to see what they did in the software though. They do not even have knowledge of changing anything on the form, they only remember recently unpublishing the process temporarily then republishing it.

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replied two days ago

I have seen a similar 'corruption' of a business process in the past though I believe in my case exporting and re-importing seemed to correct the issue. Do any of the forms in the business process have JavaScript that you could temporarily remove to test if re-importing it has a different result? I would be curious to compare an export of the xml from the broken system to an export of the xml from the VM where the BP loads to see if anything is malformed.

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replied one day ago • Show version history

The JS and CSS panes were completely empty but I did find these 2 areas where someone was trying to use JS in both class names and calculation fields. If I remove them, save the form, then download it from my staging environment. I can upload it back to the customer environment and open the form finally!

However this doesn't let me fix their existing process which is in production. I really don't understand why the form is working in my staging environment. Possibly because I am using a build 2503 since build 2410 is no longer available.

Update: I just realized you can not save the form with invalid class names or calculations. So someone could not have put this JS here, it is almost as if though the system did this.

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replied two days ago

The error seemed to be a known bug #569395 which existed on 12.0.2410.345 and has been fixed on 12 Update 1.

Please check following this: export the bp and search for '<referenceFieldId>0</referenceFieldId>'. If the block could be found then it should be this bug.

A short-term workaround was update 0 to -1 in the above block and re-import the file to overwrite the existing process.

Also we had an individual hotfix for the bug, please open a support ticket if you need it, thanks.

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replied one day ago • Show version history

I did find that in the export. Is the hotfix something that allows us to fix this without any downtime?

If that is the case I will request it now and get them fixed right away.

Otherwise we would just schedule a complete upgrade over the weekend if we need to take the system offline anyways.

Also does overwriting a process keep all the existing tasks and instance states intact?

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replied one day ago

The hotfix needs a recycle of Forms App Pool so there will be downtime.

Upgrade to 12 Update 1 is recommended.

And overwriting a process keeps all the existing data, including tasks and instances.

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Lost the ability to access a form with the forms designer - ever happened to anyone else?

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