Error on the Valence Connect Demo

[tim.green]

Hi CNX,

I'm having trouble trying to run the valence-connect demo as outlined in the excellent video that Johnny put together.

After setting up the demo app in the Valence Portal - I click on the application's icon. The screen displays the grid heading of "Customer #, Name, City, State" as well as the paging controls but then I get an Invalid Session message box which states:
Your Valence session is no longer active. This may be due to inactivity timeout or termination by an administrator. See error log for further details.

(see attached "Invalid Session Msg" screen shot )

I looked in the Valence Error log but no errors are listed.

I followed Johnny's example as close as I could. I had to run the "npm install valence-connect --save" on my Windows 10 desktop because our IBM i is behind a very strict firewall. But I copied the resulting folder's to our IBMi and successfully started the node app.

When I run the app from the Valence portal I can see the logged statements in my PASE console, so I know it is running.

(see attached "PASE console" screen shot)

And I can run other Valence apps from that same portal session with no problem.

My Valence 5.2 version is 5.2.20180817.1 - which several versions behind your current version, but I looked at your release notes and didn’t see anything that specifically pertained to Valence-Connect issues in the newer versions.

I can certainly have our sys admin update the version to see if I get different results, since I am trying this on our QA (non-production) LPAR. Let me know if that is worth a try or if you think there might be something else wrong.

I'm new to Node.js and have a proof-of-concept that I'd like to try but need to make sure your sample is running before I go down that road.

Thanks for any help….

Tim Green
Colorado PERA

[Johnny Major]

Hi Tim,

Is the Valence Connect consumer assigned to a valid user and environment? I would expect to see something in the Errors application. Also, that user id must have access to that environment.

Screen Shot 2019-04-18 at 11.21.25 AM.png

Thanks

[tim.green]

Johnny,
My Valence Connect consumer looked just like your screen shot (except for the key of course).

I am running all my apps out of the "Base " environment - that is the only one defined on this instance of Valence.

The User was VVADMIN but I changed it to my user id - But I'm still getting the same Invalid Session message. And there is still nothing in the Errors application.

I looked at the job logs of all the Valence52 jobs but I see no errors there either. Nor do I see any error in Apache logs.

Should I look somewhere else?

TimG

[Johnny Major]

Tim,

Might be good to schedule an online meeting because I am not sure if you can log in and use that environment. Can you email support@cnxcorp.com and I will set up a quick meeting. I am available today if you have time otherwise we can schedule it for the near future.

Then we will report to this post on the findings.

[tim.green]

Hi Johnny,

Thanks for your help last week. Here is an update regarding our "Invalid Session" issue.

I re-ran the "npm install valence-connect --save" on our development IBMi so I had a fresh app completely built on the "i" then ported that directory to our "QA" box (the same machine we were working on during our call with you) with NO success.

Unfortunately I got the same error as before.

We use single-sign-on at Colorado PERA extensively for ALL our apps (valence or otherwise) in fact Valence's support for Kerberos was a huge factor in our selection process. But we've had other 3rd party apps under evaluation that had issues with Kerberos so, on a whim, I thought I would try the valence-connect demo with Kerberos turned off….

…it came right up, exactly as your video described it.

So now the BIG question; "is Kerberos single-sign-on support something that can be supported in valence-connect?"

Thanks,

Looking forward to your response...
TimG

[Johnny Major]

When you say you turned Kerberos off do you mean you just went into Valence Portal Admin - Settings and unchecked "Use Kerberos at login"?

Screen Shot 2019-04-22 at 9.34.58 AM.png

[tim.green]

Johnny,
I did un-check that setting but I also had to remove the lines in the apache config file (httpd.conf) for the Kerberos support.

apacheConfig.PNG
TimG

[Johnny Major]

Tim,

I think you should be setting Kerberos on vvlogin not on the whole valence52 directory.

<Location /valence/vvlogin.pgm>
   Order Allow,Deny
   Allow from All
   Require valid-user
   UserID %%CLIENT%%
   PasswdFile %%KERBEROS%%
   AuthType Kerberos
</Location>

Can you add it for vvlogin and remove it from the valence52 directory and let me know your findings?

Thanks

[tim.green]

SUCCESS!!!!

Limiting the Kerberos specs to just the vvlogin.pgm location appears to have resolved our issue.

And single-sign-on still appears to be functioning as intended.

Johnny, THANKS for all your HELP on this....

TimG