Spotfire Server: Information Designer Prompts For Login in a Kerberos Environment

In Spotfire Analyst client 12.1 and greater, including version 14.0, the following prompt will be seen when launching Information Designer tool using Data menu -> Information Designer.

Note, this is only applicable if your Spotfire environment uses Kerberos user authentication.



At the time of writing this article (February 2023) this is known product defect awaiting resolution. The issue occurs because a separate java process for Information Services in launched in versions 12.1 and above. This process is unable to receive Kerberos authorization headers from the client session.

A workaround is to stop the separate Information Services java process and switch it to run within the main Spotfire Server process:

1) Login to the Spotfire Server and export the configuration:

config.(bat|sh) export-config

2) Disable Information Services launching as a separate process:

config.(bat|sh) set-config-prop -n information-services.external-process.enabled -v false

 
3) Import the new configuration:

config.(bat|sh) import-config -c "Disabled IS launching as external process"

4) Copy all JDBC driver .jar files that are used by Information Links from <Spotfie Installation dir>\tomcat\custom-ext-informationservices\ to <Spotfie Installation dir>\tomcat\custom-ext\directory.

5) Restart Spotfire Server process

Information Designer should now launch without a login prompt.