OnCommand 5.0 - odd HTML behavior with "Reports" tab

[reide]

I am running OnCommand 5.0 on a W2K8 R2 x64 server.  For demos, I access the OnCommand unified manager on this server in one of two ways:

• I Remote Desktop into the W2K8 R2 server and run a local instance of IE 8, or
• I use IE 8 on my laptop and just point it to the OnCommand server

Both the W2K8 server and my laptop are running the exact same version of IE 8 (version 8.0.7601.17514).   Both browsers have been configured according to the OnCommand 5.0 browser requirements (Compatibility View is off, Active-X scripts enabled).  Both browsers have the Flash plug-in.

In OnCommand 5.0, when I navigate to the "Reports" tab and view a capacity report, I get different HTML results:

• My W2K8 server's local instance of IE 8 shows absolutely no options when I click on the column headings.  No menu pops-up for sorting, filtering, alignment, etc...  Nothing!
• My laptop's instance of IE 8 works perfectly. All column options show-up (filtering, sorting,alignmnet, etc...)

I cannot figure out why I'm getting different results from these two browsers when they're the exact same version and configured the same way.  What is it about the "Reports" page that is so different from the "Storage" or "Servers" page?   Both browsers seem to work fine on the "Storage" or "Servers" page.

Any ideas????

[reide]

Some other intersting facts about this issue:

• I Installed Firefox 3.6.23 on my W2K8 server.  When I use Firefox, the "Reports" all work perfectly.  I get the menus for sorting, filtering, alignment.
• I know for certain that this W2K8 server's instance of IE was working properly at one time.  I just cannot figure out what has changed that broke it when it comes to OnCommand 5.0's Reports.

[adaikkap]

In OnCommand 5.0 the reporting is done using BIRT reporting tool, which is exposed in the Reports TAB. Its because of BIRT you have all this browser compatibility issue, and limited browser variety and version support if am not wrong.

Regards

adai

[reide]

Thanks Adai.  This at least gives me a starting point for troubleshooting:

"BIRT has two main components: a visual report designer within the Eclipse IDE for creating BIRT Reports, and a runtime component for generating reports that can be deployed to any Java environment. The BIRT project also includes a charting engine that is both fully integrated into the report designer and can be used standalone to integrate charts into an application."

I suspect this issue started when I had to install the Java SE on the server for a different application. I'll start there and see what I can find.

[reide]

Even though I already had Java 6 SE installed on my W2K8 server, I removed it, downloaded the latest version (Java 6 update 27), and re-installed it.  After that, my IE 8 browser on my W2K8 server properly displayed the advanced features in OnCommand 5.0's reports.  Unfortunately, I have no idea what originally caused my Java to stop working correctly.

[reide · Accepted solution]

I finally figured this out.  I tend to bounce between the new OnCommand 5.0 console and the older Operations Manager GUI.  When I'd use Operations Manager, I'd occasionally click "compatibility mode" in my IE 8 browser to clean-up the list of groups.  Doing this added my lab's domain to the list of web sites to use IE compatibility version on.  Later, I'd use the same IE 8 browser to access the OnCommand 5.0 Console and not realize that compatibility mode was now "on".   Therefore the advanced features in BIRT wouldn't work properly.  Once you correctly disable compatibility mode, the advanced BIRT features work again.