Spotfire Web Player: blank blue screen when attempting to open a report

Summary:

When attempting to open a report in the Spotfire Web Player or on mobile device, a blank blue screen is displayed instead of the report. This normally occurs when trying to access the report from outside the internal network or when accessing Spotfire Server through other devices like a load balancer, proxy, etc.
 

Details:

When attempting to open a report in the Spotfire Web Player or on mobile device, a blank blue screen is displayed instead of the analysis file:

This issue normally is seen when trying to access the report from outside the internal network or when accessing Spotfire Server through other devices like a load balancer, proxy, etc.

One very common cause for this is when network devices like load balancers, reverse proxies, firewall, etc which are located between end-user's client machine and Spotfire Server machine are not allowing, or interfering with, the websockets protocol which is required for correct Spotfire operation. This article will help determine if this is the root cause.

Note: There are other potential causes for a blue blank screen, such as:

• Load Balancer/Proxy/Firewall interference with the Spotfire HTTP requests (for example, cookie or header manipulation)
• Spotfire Server cluster stability issues relating to Apache Ignite

If the issue is confirmed not to be due to websocket protocol interference, as described in this article, please contact Support for further assistance. 

 

Resolution:

First, confirm that external interference with the websocket protocol is the root cause in your situation. This can be done using either or both of the following methods:

Method 1: Disabling WebSockets

As a diagnostic test to confirm this is the issue in your environment, you can disable the use of websockets in Spotfire by setting webSocketsEnabled="False" in the Spotfire Web Player configuration (and ensuring the updated configuration is used by your Web Player, see Manually editing the service configuration files).

Note: If you are going to analyze streaming data in web clients, this variable must be set to true, but even if you plan to use streaming, disabling this setting can be very useful way to help isolate the root cause. 

If the files open successfully after disabling WebSockets, then the issue is confirmed to be due to interference with the WebSocket protocol in the environment and investigation needs to continued by the end-user's IT or network team.

Method 2: WebSocket test outside of Spotfire Server

Another diagnostic tool is to run a CSG/Spotfire Support provided JavaScript tool that mimics Spotfire's use of WebSockets. This tool is available for download at the bottom of this article.

This small test app (ws-server.zip) should be installed on a server as close to the Spotfire Server as possible.

This is a Node.js application that creates a web socket server and an html page that shows the attempt to connect to that web socket server. This mimics the Spotfire behavior (except support for https) and is helpful to show if there is a general problem with websocket usage in the environment. Ensure Node.js is installed first and  that ports 8080 and 8081 are open and accessible.

Instructions:
1. Extract the contents of the .zip file on the server machine (Spotfire Server or Node Manager) , then install the program using:

>npm start

This will start a web server at port 8080 and a web socket server on port 8081 (can be changed if needed)

2. Open a browser to the server (port 8080) where the app was installed.
3. See that the connection status field turns green:

4. Press send and see that the web socket server returns a valid response.
5, Perform the same test using a client and connection where Spotfire fails to set up a web socket connection

If the test server fails to set up a websocket connection, then the issue is confirmed to be due to interference with the WebSocket protocol in the environment and investigation needs to continued by the end-user's IT or network team.

Diagram:


If either of these tests confirm that there is an issue with the use of websockets in the environment, then the end-user's IT or network team should continue the investigation. Specifically, the network devices (Load balancer / Reverse proxy / Firewall / etc) between Spotfire Server and end-user client machine should be investigated to ensure they are not interfering with the websockets protocol which is required for correct Spotfire operation.

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