Dealing With “Cannot Get List Of Connections” 9iAS Discoverer Error

Just came across an interesting error when plugging a new Discoverer mid-tier instance into an existing 9iAS Farm. The Discoverer server was running on Windows 2000, the server on Unix.

When I tried to create the first public connection (to check that Discoverer portlets work), I got the error message "Cannot get a list of connections. Fail to convert between UTF8 and UCS2: failUTF8Conv".

Having spoken to the DBA, he also had a problem when first logging on to Discoverer Plus, with the error message "An error occurred trying to communicate with the connection store" when first bringing up the <server_name:port>/discoverer/plus URL.

Having looked around metalink, this error is mentioned in a previous posting and seems to occur when the 9iAS Infrastructure is running on Unix. Metalink Note 198517.1 advises what to do, and it's fairly easy to sort out.

In brief, the problem is caused by the 9ias infrastructure database being set up to use UTF8 (unicode) as the database character set. To resolve the issue, carry out the following steps;

1. Find the password for the seed database schema user ORASSO
2. Connect to the seed database using the ORASSO username and the password obtained from step 1
3. Check that the following SELECT statement only returns one row
   
   

   select count(*) from orasso.wwsso_psex_user_info$ where app_id like '1326';

4. If it does, run the following DELETE statement
   
   delete from orasso.wwsso_psex_user_info$ where app_id like '1326'; 

5. You should now be able to bring up the Discoverer Connections screen and create your connections as normal.

Metalink Note 198517.1 gives more details, including how to retrieve the ORASSO password.