Non-Admin users can't access Cognos Connection or Public Folders

[Paddy_K]

Hello everyone,

We are facing a strange issue in Cognos 8 where non admin users (Access Manager/SunOne namespace) CAN connect to Cognos 8, see Welcome Page, but can't access Cognos Connection (Public Folders, etc). They can access other studios via same Welcome page.

Error they get is

CM-REQ-4158
The search path "storeID("")" is invalid.
DPR-ERR-2082 An error has occurred. Please contact your administrator. The complete error has been logged by CAF with SecureErrorID:xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Can someone PLEASE help solve this issue?

An SR is open with IBM-Cognos but haven't got any response so far.
Thanks so much!


Background of the issue:

I have 7 environments to manage for 2 organizations in our company, say Org_1 and Org_2.

In Org_1, 4 (RND, DEV, TEST, PROD) environments' namespace ids are all named as "Default" since long, which was bit confusing with the English word 'default' and also didn't tell who from where in all the places. Also the users and especially their privileges are different in different environments, like some in DEV with R/W/E/T but in TEST or PROD with only R/E/T. Some exist only in TEST and PROD but not in RND or DEV and such.

To overcome that issue, I decided to name the namespace in Org_2 with more meaningful and specific names like "Org_2_BI_PROD_Series_7".

The 3 other environments DEV, TEST and PROD in the 2nd organization are created new, by cloning the content store at database level (Oracle 10g) cloned from the PROD of first organization. The namespace id in the newly cloned environment is "Org_2_BI_PROD_Series_7", which is different than Org_1's PROD nameapce  "Default". (I don't have regular Cognos Deployments across environments, we do that through separate file server process using Version Manger), so I didn't anticipate portability issues of the new development under different namespace ids.

This worked just fine in the Org_2's new PROD. All the users could access and work fine in the Org_2's PROD.

Then I followed exact same steps while creating Org_2's TEST, as "Administrator" (series 7 Root User Class) and didn't realized till I released the environment to non-admin users that they can't see Cognos Connection portal (the public folders and menu options etc). However, they all can access Report Studio, QS, etc alright. I have made sure that on Cognos Connection, Directory Users Groups Roles tab that "Everyone" has R/E/T privileges (though only Traverse is sufficient).

But don't know beyond that if any record is mismatching at the database level or got inadvertantly deleted while troubleshooting another issue with Metric Store (which is resolved after recreating Metric Store and reinitializing Metric Package).

Any thoughts on what can be done to resolve this?

Thanks so much in advance

[mpflug]

I've seen this a few times and from my experience its usually a bad sign - eg corrupted content store.  In my case its come from screwing around with the auth provider.  If you're in dev it might be easiest to drop and recreate the content store.  Good luck with cognos support...very helpful folks :)

[CognosSupport]

Hi,

This error you mentioned:
-------------------------
CM-REQ-4158
The search path "storeID("")" is invalid.
DPR-ERR-2082 An error has occurred. Please contact your administrator. The complete error has been logged by CAF with SecureErrorID:xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
-------------------------

Can you go back to cogserver.log and check for the whole message, that may tell you why non-admins can't see public folder.

Also, did you secure your public folder?
1. Get your admin to login to public folder
2. Locate the "Set Properties - public folder" icon on top right hand
3. Check under permission, try adding "Everyone" back in with Read access to test with non-admin again to prove the point

Regards,
Z