Apliqo UX URL stopped working after change in Instances.json file

Hi everyone,

We wanted to change the name of an instance and were advised to do so in the instances.json file. After making the change, we restarted the contentStore and the application server but were unable to connect to the url.

The url either would go into endless loop with the message ‘Please wait’, or throw an error - ‘ContentStore: Instance is not responding - Please contact your administrator’.

I reverted the changes and restored the backup but it didn’t resolve the issue.

Kindly advise.

What exactly do you mean by “change the name of an instance”?

For connection purposes the Rest API (Apliqo UX included) doesn’t care about the name of the instance at all, the connection URL (the IP and assigned http port) is the only thing that matters. As the IP or port could theoretically change between sessions internally in the content store UX uses the name assigned to the connection URL as the key to reference the datasource which the widgets will connect to to retrieve data. This means that migration is a non-issue as all you need to do is define the same instance name in the instances.json between environments.

I’m not sure why you would wish to change the name in the instances.json for a reporting instance as this is really an internal reference for UX. It is never exposed to end users except when selecting a data source for a widget in edit mode. If you had an existing application and you renamed an instance in the instances.json file then you would need to run the find/replace utility in the content sotre to update names before the application would work.

Note you cannot ever rename the content store. It must always be named “contentStore”. Otherwise nothing will work.

To rename the whole app (the URL where you connect to UX) you simply stop the apliqo application server and rename the folder in the webapps directory and restart the service. Simple as that.

So back to the question. What exactly are you trying to rename??

Thanks for the detailed response. Our aim is to get rid of ‘_Dev’ in the instance name, and were told that we can do that by making the change json file (please refer to the screenshot below - marked in yellow)

We’re NOT trying to change the name of the contentStore.

If you remove _Dev and you already build the application referring to the instance in your MDX the application may stop working due to the hardcoded name inside view definition for specific views

If you have already built the application then as well as changing the name in the instances.json file you will need to run the instance find/replace utility TI process in the content store. Suggest you look at the documentation Processes | UX Installation & Configuration Guide | Apliqo End User

Update: We were able to fix the issue by deleting all the unused instances in the json file and restarting the app server.

Thank you everyone for the advice and help on this.