Hi this is an attempt to group things that have caused a HTTP500 - even more dreaded than application error.

1. Inclusion of exclamation Mark ! or sometimes backslashes \ at the end of lines.

2. Modify where binary transactions are logged to screen log to file instead.

LOG INVALID ON IF1202_&STEP MSG OFF
LOG FORMAT ON IF1202_&STEP MSG OFF
LOG NOMATCH ON IF1202_&STEP MSG OFF
LOG DUPL ON IF1202_&STEP MSG OFF

Please can others add to this post so there is some sort of list we can work through

Regards

John

More data:

HTTP 500 is an application failure which in wf will be the java servlet WFServlet.

WFServlet processing occurs in 2 phases.

1. It determines whether all amper variables are resolved and re-directs to an amper prompting screen if not.

2. It passes the resolved query to the wf server and then waits to receive the HTML output from the server and then feeds that back as HTML to IIS which in turn passes data back to the browser.

HTTP 500 can occur at both stages.

Enter the wf administration console > diagnostics > traces > wf servlet > Trace on

Run your proc and refresh the screen - you should see output namely java trace backs which you may need to edit independently of the wf default editor in webfocus71\logs.

This should determine if its phase 1 or 2 or give you some pointers.

Here's were the application log is for Apache - dont know where it is for Atlanta or the other Application Servers

F:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\Tomcat 5.5\logs\stdoutdate.log

The messages are quire useful so it's worth taking a look.

hammo1j is correct! The output log usually contains the full exception that generated the 500 error.

What I do to make this simple, is I remove the 500 error redirect in the web.xml in my development environments. Now, when I get a 500 type error, I get the full output log dump to my browser. I just find it a pain to in the butt to continually have to find then open the app server logs.

Hacker's Delight! I love it!

I assume the file is:
Drive:\ibi\WebFOCUS53\webapps\webfocus53\WEB-INF\web.xml

And the change to make is:

Before

  
<!-- Redirect all responses with status code=500 to this page -->
  <error-page>
      <error-code>500</error-code>
      <location>/applicationErrorPage.jsp</location>
  </error-page>

After

  <!-- Redirect all responses with status code=500 to this page -->
  <!--
  <error-page>
      <error-code>500</error-code>
      <location>/applicationErrorPage.jsp</location>
  </error-page>
  -->

Fran

Tried your mod and now I get the apache HTTP 500 error page - which shows more detail but nothing like the in depth report in the log.

Is there anyway of tweaking Apache to show more detail?

Regards

John

Perhaps changing a "Debug Level" setting in Apache...

A useful URL to change stack size on Apache

Does anyone know good initial/maximum/thread stack settings and roughly what they mean?

I have further found out Amper autoprompting causes HTP500 errors

1. In proportion to the number of statements containing amper variables (NB not according to the numbers being prompted for)
2. Is less likely to occur if the proc is executed rather than an adhoc fex eg run from within editor of dev studio.

Putting spaces between the amper variable and the equals sign seems to help.

eg instead of
-DEFAULTS &XYZ=40;

code

-DEFAULTS &XYZ = 40;

No idea why but worth a try when you are getting desparate!

We just started getting them last week on a very large program that should be displaying the autoprompt screen when run from Dev. Studio.

Program works fine when run from a browser with a custom launch page.

After 3 hours of cutting and pasting, I traced it down to lines that had tick marks (single quotes) in them. When I removed the lines (commenting them out didn't help) even though lines above them in the fex had the same code, the autoprompt screen appeared. Very strange.

I have opened a case with IBI.