Unable to set session in Oracle Portal useing reverse proxy

Question

I have deployed a reverse proxy (using Oracle HTTP Server) in front of a Oracle Portal Install (version 10.1.2.0.2). The steps followed to set this up came from the following documents:
Steps mentioned in Section 9.2 Configuring a Reverse Proxy for OracleAS Portal and OracleAS Single Sign-On for a reverse proxy on a Oracle HTTP Server.
http://download-west.oracle.com/docs/cd/B14099_15/core.1012/b13998/variants.htm#ASTED005
Also performed steps mentioned in -> Section 5.3.7 - Step 7: Enable Session Binding on OracleAS Web Cache of the Oracle® Application Server Portal Configuration Guide 10g Release 2 (10.1.2) -- B14037-03.
My current (example names shown only)setup details are as follows:
Reverse Proxy for SSO server (running on internal.oracle.com:7777): proxy.oracle.com:7777
Reverse Proxy for Portal server (running on internal.oracle.com:7778): proxy.oracle.com:7778
With the above steps completed, I can successfully use the http://proxy.oracle.com:7777/pls/orasso for login into SSO without any issues.
Users get authenticated successfully.
I can also use http://proxy.oracle.com:7778/pls/portal for viewing pages on the portal fine . All self referencing links have also been successfully modified to point to proxy.oracle.com:7778.
However, an attempt to login in the portal is not successful. Clicking on the 'Login' link successfully redirects to the SSO login page (http://proxy.oracle.com:7777/<login-page>). However, after successful authentication, the success page fails to show up and the user gets shown the initial login portal home page again.
There are no error messages shown on the screen.But it seems that user session is failing to be initiated/set correctly, as shown by the log file (in $PORTAL_ORACLE_HOME/j2ee/OC4J_Portal/application-deployments/portal/OC4J_Portal_default_island_1/application.log ):
06/11/21 16:49:31 portal: [module=RepositoryServlet, ecid=83928411196,1] Repository Gateway: LWUser: PUBLIC, Cookie: oracle.uix=0^^GMT+10:00;
portal=9.0.3+en-au+us+AUSTRALIA+22BC75924EEAD8A2E040007F010019F7+8DAC5E3559C95F5E0090A6F56FFA58192CB0F437CA57A9102A6394F1EB7FAB5DEE3BFA12C65
91C0C009B6......
06/11/21 16:49:31 portal: [module=RepositoryServlet, ecid=83928411196,1] ERROR: Repository Gateway error: Database Error: ORA=20001 ORA-20001:
Unable to obtain session information from the cookie. Please close your browser and reconnect.
ORA-06512: at "PORTAL.WPG_SESSION", line 149
ORA-06512: at line 22
Any help with this will be appreciated.
Thanks.

Answer 1

Hi Chris,
The begin of the expection stack gives you the reason:
06/11/03 09:13:59 java.sql.SQLException: The method 'setSavepoint' cant be called when a global transaction is active
The reason is, that either the whole global transaction must be commited or rollbacked.
I don't know your actual configuration, but between the methods begin() and commit()/rollback() of the UserTransaction instance, OC4J/OracleAS uses a global transaction (= XA transaction) in your configuration. The state of a global transactions is completely under the control of the application server and several restrictions must be considered. One of them is, that you can't use the method setSavePoint/. E.g. you can't also call the method setAutoCommit(true) in this state, or change the transaction isolation level via setTransactionIsolation(newLevel).
This is NOT a limitation of the OC4J/OracleAS but is true for ALL application servers.
P.S. I can successfully set savepoints and rollback to savepoints in weblogic 9.0This means, that WebLogic 9.0 doesn't use a global transaction in this case.
Because I don't know your configurations (Oracle and WebLogic) I can't say, why the behave different in this situation.
Best,
Manfred