KB-1196 Process notes and web content channels are blank after migration

Symptoms

After migrating your system from one version to another or from one server to another, the process notes and web content channels are blank. If portal applications use web content channels, they will also be empty. This message related to process notes may appear in the application server log when trying to store note content.

[ServerService Thread Pool -- 81] ERROR com.appiancorp.process.notes.services.NotesContentServiceImpl - An error occurred while trying to store note content. location=##OLD LOCATION

INFO  [stdout] (ServerService Thread Pool -- 81) java.io.IOException: No such file or directory

Note: The above log message relates only to the process notes component and has nothing to do with web content channels. You will not see any information related to blank data in the logs with default configuration.

Cause

This is because the older system had a different path to the <APPIAN_HOME> than the new system. If the <APPIAN_HOME> directory is different on the new system then it won’t be able to find the relevant data.

Action

You will have to modify and run the script <APPIAN_HOME>/_admin/_scripts/tools/change-paths.sh to update the system to the new paths. Open the script, and update the OLD_PATH_* variables to the corresponding to the old <APPIAN_HOME> path. Note that the below script will address all of the problems with all three directories. It will look like the following:

#!/bin/bash
OLD_PATH_MSG=##OLD APPIAN_HOME##/server/msg
OLD_PATH_MWS=##OLD APPIAN_HOME##/_admin/mini
OLD_PATH_NOTES=##OLD APPIAN_HOME##/_admin/process_notes
NEW_PATH_MSG=##NEW APPIAN_HOME##/server/msg/
NEW_PATH_MWS=##NEW APPIAN_HOME##/_admin/mini
NEW_PATH_NOTES=##NEW APPIAN_HOME##/_admin/process_notes

pushd ..
java -cp classpath.jar com.appiancorp.tools.ChangePaths MWS $OLD_PATH_MWS $NEW_PATH_MWS
java -cp classpath.jar com.appiancorp.tools.ChangePaths FORUMS $OLD_PATH_MSG $NEW_PATH_MSG
java -cp classpath.jar com.appiancorp.tools.ChangePaths NOTES $OLD_PATH_NOTES $NEW_PATH_NOTES
popd

After modifying the script, save it and execute it. Check to see if the data is back in your web content channels and process notes.

Affected Versions

This article applies to all versions of Appian.