I was recently working with a client who was having trouble installing the 8.3 Web Action items manifest (Infor v8.3 Action Items VFS.zip). Within this manifest are actions like create triggers or drop indexes. Whenever these Database Definition Language commands were attempted they would receive the dreaded and completely useless “Object Reference not Set to an Instance of an Object” error. Looking in the log files on the App Architect server it showed a little more information:
ERROR Sage.SalesLogix.SLXSystemProvider [(null)] – The call to GetNativeConnection returned an invalid result.
What the what?
It turns out that one simple hidden thing was causing this issue.
When setting up the Connection Manager server data link definition, you have to go into the All properties and make two changes:
1) Set persist security from false to true. This allows saving the SQL user password in the definition
2) Click the Reset Value button in the Integrated Security property. This is needed even though there is no value showing in the Integrated Security property.
It turns out that item number 2 was the culprit on this. Once the connection was adjusted, the web manifest could install without issue. A warning on this also. While the client was seeing errors when installing the Action Items manifest, there are actually similar commands that get run when restoring the 8.3 project backup with the “Rebuild Schema from Project” check box ticked. Thing is there are no errors shown during the restore so those can easily be missed. They are logged to the server log. Luckily, installing the first web manifest did throw on on screen error to alert us of the problem.
Kris,
Thought I’d add to this post and share a recent experience we had.
We ran into the same error recently during a customer upgrade, we got everything to work and the only thing that failed was applying the the 8.3 VFS Action items bundle as described in your post. We tried the solutions you suggested but they did not resolve the issue.
In our case it turned out to be an incompatibility with SQL 2014 SP2 which is listed by Infor as not supported. When we moved the database to a SQL 2014 database server that was not on SP2, the issue went away.
The irony is that after these bundles are applied, the database can go back to running on SQL 2014 SP2 just fine. In fact, unknown to us, the customer was running Infor CRM v8.2 on on SQL 2014 SP2 for the last year without any issues.
Thought I’d share this in case someone else runs into the same issue and comes across your article.
Kris,
Did you get an error that said, “The path chosen does not represent a valid bundle file. The connection string has not been initialized.?” I keep getting that in 8.3 and therefore can’t install any bundles, not even the ICRM VFS Action.zip.
Thanks in advance.
Make sure you are using the shortest possible path to the bundle and that it is local. Try putting the bundle right in the root of C:\ or something similar
I did do that and I am still getting the error. Could it have anything to do with working in a kubisys environment?
No idea. Never worked in that before. All I have ever run into is if the path to the bundle is too long or it is in a location you don’t have read/write permissions