KB-1069 Legacy Designer (/designer) does not load properly

Symptoms

When accessing /designer, the page does not render correctly. Some of the symptoms are as follows:

• In Tempo, the Appian logo is not displayed.
• In /designer, the tabs Home, Processes, Rules, etc. are missing.
• In /designer, the footer is missing.
• The following error messages appear in the application server log:

ServerService Thread Pool -- 61] ERROR com.appiancorp.ap2.navigation.NavigationServiceImpl - An error occurred while loading the navigation-config.xml file.
[ServerService Thread Pool -- 58] ERROR com.appiancorp.common.initialize.MigrateNavigationConfig - Could not merge navigation-config stored in content with the one provided by default. INFO stdout java.io.FileNotFoundException: /_admin/accdocs1/2/10001009.xml (No such file or directory)

Cause

The navigation-config.xml file, located in <APPIAN_HOME>/_admin/accdocs1, is responsible for navigation in /designer. If Appian cannot find the file in the specified directory, users will experience issues with navigation.

Note: Users will not see a file explicitly named navigation-config.xml in that directory. It will be represented as 1000XXXX.xml.

Action

To correct this issue, perform the following actions with a System Administrator user:

1. Navigate to <SCHEME>://<SERVER_AND_PORT>/suite/design (e.g. https://example.appian.com/suite/design) and perform an object search for the System Knowledge Center.
2. Select System Knowledge Center > Priority Icons.
3. Select the checkbox next to navigation-config and select Upload New Version in the actions above the file list.
4. Select the navigation-config.xml file located in <APPIAN_HOME>/ear/suite.ear/web.war/WEB-INF/conf/dataload/navigation.

Workaround

If the steps above do not resolve the issue, a workaround is loading the default templates to the environment. To do this, perform the following:

1. Take a backup of your environment. Refer to Configuring Backup and Restoration
2. Start the environment
3. Run load.bat|sh located in <APPIAN_HOME>/_admin/_scripts.

NOTE: Running load.bat|sh removes any previously created default dashboard templates, process model dashboard template pages, and email templates. It replaces them with the default pages and reports that ship with the product. Refer to Loading Default Reports and Views for more information.

Affected Versions

This article applies to all versions of Appian.