CNS-9025 An internal error occurred. ORA-00904: EXTRA_COL: invalid ID

Question

With our new version of Mobile Server (10.2.0.2) a lot of problems seem to have been solved. In older versions we didn't succeed in republishing. Meaning we had to drop the old version en publish a new version. Doing this meant we had to redo data subsetting for every user, which is a lengthy task. Besides it triggers full refresh for every user, that is a major one as well.
In the new version a lot goes better, but still we are experiencing some problems (or challenges).
Again the main issue is that in the course of time our application grows.
Now we stumble into the simple issue:
We want to add a column to our database.
What we do is the following (as described by Oracle):
- Add the column (EXTRA_COL) to our 'mother'database
- Alter the snapshot definition for this column (add the column)
- Republish...
When I resynch the new column appears on my client, so far so good.
However if I change something to the data on the client and I do a resynch I get:
"CNS-9025 An internal error occurred. ORA-00904: EXTRA_COL: invalid ID.
It seems as though 'internally' the column is not added everywhere it should be.
For example the CEQ$table does not have the EXTRA_COL column.
I'm quite sure that somebody else should encounter these problems as well as new views lead to data structure changes quite often.
Anybody encountering this as well, and more important, somebody got a clue on what is going on?
Thnx in advance.

Answer 1

There is a bug with 10.2 where the re-publish of a item that has has ddl changes (like an extra column) does not always work correctly. It seems to be intermittent (at least in our environment) and the symptoms are
alter base schema table
re-publish snapshot (note if the snapshot definition is the standard 'select * from ...' you should not need to do anything apart from republishing)
no errors reported in the re-publish
however the new column has not been added to either CEQ$object OR CFM$WTGPI_nnnnn (the inqueue table for the object) - the missing column on the CFM$ table is the source of the error shown above in the posting as there is a mismatch when the data is uploaded
dropping the publication item would fix the problem, but be aware if you have any users out there, when they synchronise any data being uploaded for a publication item that has been dropped and re-created will be LOST with no error being reported (in the sync history you will see a blank name in the upload section), due to the internal mapping having changed
We have found that normally when this happens forcing a republish of the affected object by making a change to the selection logic (eg adding something like 'id is not null') and republishing again fixes the problem - as with a lot of mobile issues, fiddle with it enough and it will eventiually sort itself out