Cognos Viewer Porlet Not Working in 8.3 abc

[cdallum]

We recently upgraded to Cognos 8.3 (from 8.2) and applied SP1.  One issue I've noticed is that Cognos Viewer portlets on user pages are not displaying correctly.  For instance, when selecting a simple table report to be viewed in the portlet, the formatting of the table is removed and any navigational links (up, down, etc.) are missing.  Also, drill-throughs to other reports are not working.  This appears to be a problem with the portlet because when I go to the original report, it functions and displays correctly.  I also created a new page from scratch, and the issue is persistent.  Therefore, I don't feel this is a problem with the content store upgrade.

Has anyone else seen this problem and found a solution?  I'm working with Cognos support, but so far their best suggestion was to perform a clean install of 8.3.  We did that, but the issues remained.

[Nuffsaid]

We installed SP1 in an effort to fix some other issues, which it didn't. After the install we experienced "weird" behaviour with the portlets. Rolled back the service pack and everything returned to normal.

[cdallum]

Turns out we had some issues with our web server configuration, which is using Apache.  We were able to figure it out with "help" from Cognos.

[Nuffsaid]

Interesting, we use Apache also. Can you elaborate on your fix?

[cdallum]

Sorry I'm unable to personally elaborate, but our Unix admin provided the following information:

The problem was that we had a (virtual) site defined with the Cognos content files as our document root.  So any requests to http://cognos/ loaded the site just fine.  For some strange reason, those portlets really didn’t like that setup, and would start trying weird locations for files if that was the URL in use.  It wants to see a /cognos8/ directory.  So I had to define an alias for /cognos8/ to point to our Cognos content. The URL to reach them thus changed to http://cognos/cognos8/
In order to not break all the links we were using, I also used a URL rewrite to move any requests from http://cognos/ to http://cognos/cognos8/.  Although that wasn’t strictly necessary.