Experience Builder on 11.1, Items not being available - CONT_122 error

[Scott_Tansley]

This is more of a warning and hopefully something that will help than a question.

I've recently had two clients have the same issue appear when using the embedded Experience Builder in ArcGIS Enterprise 11.1.  One client is fully patched, the other is missing the latest Sites and sharing patches.

In both case trying to look at the item in Portal leads to the spinning blue symbol and no load of any item metadata.  If you try and open it from the EXB editor then you will see a message saying, "Sorry, you do not have permissions to access this application" - even though you own it.

If you try to access the item using AGO assistant then you will see:

{

"error": {

"code": 500,

"messagecode": "CONT_0122",

"message": "Unable to find ItemInfo for item 'guid'",

"details": []

}

}

If you use Developer Tools in your browser, or fiddler you will see the same responses there when it makes a request to the iteminfo during the load of your item or EXB app.

After some investigation it was found that during the 'save' of the EXB item, the iteminfo.xml on disk was becoming corrupted.  In one client the closing brackets were correct, but there was a:

    n>

addition to the very end of the XML.  In the other client,  the XML was corrupted in a different place.  Towards the end of the xml it should look like:

<url>URL TO EXB APP</url>

</ESRI_ItemInformation>

instead that clients file looked like:

<url>URL TO EXB APP</url>adbasdhjasdhjh</url>

</ESRI_ItemInformation>

where the red text invalidated the XML.  

The remedy was to copy and paste the iteminfo.xml file somewhere safe, and then copy the xml to a tool like:

https://www.xmlvalidation.com/index.php?id=1&L=0

this highlights the issues at hand and allows you to tidy it up.

The updated XML was copied back to the original item info file, which remedied the issue.

You can find the iteminfo.xml file here (typically):

C:\arcgisportal\content\items\guid\esriinfo\

I hope this helps someone else, certainly it's helped two clients recently. 

EDIT 29/05/24.  Last week I had a similar issue to this.  The XML was fine.  I looked at the PBG file in a text editor and there was a status of changed.  I took a backup of the PBF file and deleted the original.  Within minutes it was recreated and the EXB app item started working.

[StefanUseldinger]

I opened an Esri case, but since the error only occurs sporadically and cannot be clearly reproduced by Esri, it was closed 😞

Does the error occur permanently for you?

[DougYurek]

I also opened a premium support ticket and received basically the same outcome. We can't reproduce it but we're able to fix the issue. No root cause identified. 

Some Notes:

• I had to fix the XML file & delete the .pbf file before I could open the portal item again, but it fixed it w/o a portal restart. 
• In both instances of this error happening, the XML file had different 'bad syntax'
  • One contained n>
  • and the other contained mation>

Here is a copy of text from one of the corrupted XML files.  You can see how the text "mation>" was appended to the end of the file. The other item that was corrupted, had the text "n>" at the end. It's almost like the tag </ESRI_ItemInformation> is getting cut off at a random spot at the end. 

Here is what one of the XML files looked like (see the bad syntax at the end)

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"?>

<ESRI_ItemInformation Culture="en-us">

<title>Untitled experience 1</title>

<type>Web Experience</type>

<typekeywords>

<typekeyword>EXB Experience</typekeyword>

<typekeyword>JavaScript</typekeyword>

<typekeyword>Ready To Use</typekeyword>

<typekeyword>status: Draft</typekeyword>

<typekeyword>version:1.10.0</typekeyword>

<typekeyword>Web Application</typekeyword>

<typekeyword>Web Experience</typekeyword>

<typekeyword>Web Mapping Application</typekeyword>

<typekeyword>Web Page</typekeyword>

<typekeyword>Web Site</typekeyword>

</typekeywords>

</ESRI_ItemInformation>mation>

We suspect there could have been a connectivity issue while the user was saving the project, which might have corrupted the XML. Hard to nail down, but we have a lot of users and it's now happened to the same user twice (and that's all) who does work out of a field office. I'll chime in if I find out anything else.

[Richard_Purkis]

For all users experiencing this issue, Esri are investigating this internally but have at the moment not been able to reproduce this behaviour. I am therefore unable to provide a BUG number to keep track of.

If any of you have readily reproduced the issue please share the steps with me either directly, or @ mention me on this thread.

If the application isn't able to be fixed via the solutions above then there is no harm in raising a case with technical support. I will update this post when I have any updates.

Thanks

[StefanUseldinger]

I've had the error twice so far when saving a story map. After that, I created 71 more story maps and saved each one at least 10 times with different users. The problem didn't appear again after that.
I'm fairly sure that I had the problem once 1-2 years ago. But I didn't react correctly and repaired the XML, but instead deleted the portal item.