SAP 760 GUI random font changes and application lock

[former_member697481]

SAP 760 GUI UPDATE 7 ON SERVER 2016 , CITRIX, STREAMED PVS READ-ONLY IMAGE FROM SINGLE MASTER DISK.

There are several issues had with our attempt to deploy the GUI on Server 2016. However, this one is priority. When this happens it freezes the customer session. I'm wondering if there is a debug option for 760 install to enable verbose logging? A registry key? A binary file EXE switch?

I will attempt to describe the scenario based on customer feedback and have attached the relative screen shots. I have access to the forums and KB's and have not been able to find anything related or best practices relative to the installation.

There are differing symptoms where on the left hand side of the GUI the fonts randomly change and then the GUI pull downs or hierarchy (expand) stop populating or just don't populate and then lock and then you have that erroneous and out of nowhere large font character.

I have access to the portal. Going through installation guides but this is without being familiar (as of yet) with the application and the vendor unwilling to give feedback because we have labeled as development. Yet, this problem and the others are preventing this from ever becoming production. This is where I take issue with SAP Support. According to SAP Support - we must move this to production in order to get support after the fact. Rather than do what is necessary in the beginning to deliver an optimized and stable platform. It is the mitigation of risk, failures, fire drills and poor customer experience. I'm listing the font as 1st primary because it is preventing this from sign off and we are unable to get SAP to chime in or provide feedback. Any feedback is welcomed.

Exhibit A, B, C, E and F. When this happens it prevents the use of the application. Citrix PVS images are read-only streamed direct to memory (no physical disk). No obvious performance issues. There are other issues but this one is a showstopper and have not been able to find anything. Every screen shot is SAP 760 GUI running as a published application on a dedicated Silo.

[daniel_mccollum]

Per the 7.60 PL admin guide.

ActivateLogging is available & the details are referenced in section 9.2.22 Software\SAP\SAPGUI Front\SAP Frontend Server\Security

[former_member1353120]

I checked in to this in the Admin guide and my understanding is that these settings or logging can be kicked off from the console as well. And then they can access those logs from the GUI where it writes to AppData. My concern with setting these is how I can control the size or circular logging. However, I could put this in Group Policy Preferences and turn it on or of that way. At this point the session is crashing and I've not been able to find anything of help on the font issue.

[Sandra_Rossi]

You say: "Yet, this problem and the others are preventing this from ever becoming production. This is where I take issue with SAP Support. According to SAP Support - we must move this to production in order to get support after the fact."

Why do SAP say that? If you pay a license, it applies to any problem occurring in SAP software even if you didn't go live yet.

[former_member1353120]

Been a ongoing issue for six weeks. I'm simply restating what the Application Support Teams, Management, and the internal developers for this solution have stated. We have an IBM VFlex Hanna and SAP 760 "development" environment that is pending internal validation and testing in order to get to Phase II which is the customer development phase. This first phase is for the internal business application owners to perform the regression testing and I provide the infrastructure as to hosting the application but not supporting the application. I have two active-active DC's where all the business applications reside on Citrix. The LOB application owners are responsible for the maintenance and support contracts where the current production is 740. Each new instance is customer-specific and proprietary. However, the application continues to fail intermittently. SAP Support or "vendor" support will not allow us to open a support ticket for what is currently the equivalent of beta testing but the equipment to which it resides is production-ready - the application is nothing further from the truth. I'm simply trying to assist where I can overcome this obstacle. I have a dedicated Silo just for 760 applications at this point.

I've made some initial tweaks to the Font sizes and types using some of the HKLM registry settings. A lot of it seems to be Font and Theme related where the Font changes mid-transaction or attempting to use the left-hand-side dropdowns. Then it locks up as I have tried to show in the previous good to bad screen captures. Yet, we cannot open a ticket with SAP Support until after it is labeled production.

I've designed and implemented Citrix solutions for 22 years. I'm sure there is a best practices or options. I cannot be the only Citrix environment on the planet to have attempted to use SAP 760 on Citrix. The issues remain whether this is installed in a dedicated single-use VDI or Shared Session Hosts or Shared VDI Scenario.

And there does not seem to be much of anything, now having an S-ID, to resembles this specific problem. I posted this on the chance that someone from the community must have seen something like this before. The base images in the 2016 fresh install are the same as on the 740. There are hundreds of "instances" due to the customer-specific requirements.

This must be specific to the use case because we have gone through Update 6, Update 7 and as of Friday Update, 8 is now in Pilot. Perhaps that will address some of the issues or perhaps it is related to all the issues that seem to be related to the Belize theme. In the Admin Guide, it states that you can make those settings and then override the users' customization by setting an additional _readonly Dword value. Perhaps if I hardcode the theme, the font, the width, size, and so forth it would stabilize - but I need customer sign-off to go that route. In this scenario, you might have 40-50 sessions and in each session, they open 5 instances of SAP each. If they all use a different theme, font, colors and so forth - perhaps that is causing a conflict where all those sessions and instances run on the Citrix Server. Despite Citrix's popularity and the perfect use-case scenario for SAP - sparse documentation and unable to open a support ticket.

It is not from lack of trying - that is for sure. I know it makes no sense to me or anyone else but that is the result and pushback we get.

[Kevin_Norris]

Hi Brian

Did you manage to resolve the issues you have described ?

We have SAP GUI 760 patch level 7 installed on a Citrix environment and some users are randomly experiencing the same font issue you show in exhibit B and similar issues to exhibit D.

Users have also reporting issues of the application freezing after viewing a preview of an output form and trying to return to the main program.

Thanks

Kevin

[steven_verelst]

Hi Kevin,

I'm picking this up from Brian. Will still get this issue.We have now SAP Logon 760 Patch 9 hotfix 1. We tried also SAP Logon 770. Same issue.

Regards,

Steven

[michael_fallenbchel]

Hi Steven,

had some discussions with GUI developers in India - there are already some new DLLs for the GUI, e.g. ALV output, already in place. Hopefully it will be in next PL for 770, release date end of March.

Regards

Michal

[badari_nathj]

Dear Colleagues,

I am Badari from SAP GUI for windows, development support team. Thanks for sharing about the Font change/corruption issue while using SAP GUI ALV Grid.

Multiple customers reported the same issue. But unfortunately we couldn't reproduce the issue in any of our work stations and even customer are also not able to reproduce this issue in a consistent way. We understand that our customers are facing this issue very randomly. This happens only when users opens 15+ SAP GUI sessions at a time in the same work station and when they are switching from one session to other, some times font change/corruption issue is occurring. We have tried by following the same steps but unfortunately we couldn't reproduce it in our workstations.

If anybody can reproduce this, please help us by opening an incident to BC-FES-CTL component and share detailed steps to reproduce the issue so that we can prioritize this issue and help you in resolving the issue. This will really help us in finding the root cause and to provide the fix for this issue.

Regards,

Badari Nath, SAP GUI Controls team, Development Support

[michael_fallenbchel]

Hi Badari

Thanks for your update!

Just a small additional info - I had this issue once with only 5 sessions...if I foind a way to reproduce, I will add to my already created ticket + add info here.

Thanks

Michael

[michael_fallenbchel]

Update

Working now for ~2 hours after restarting SAPGUI.

What I have done so far:

Session 1, system A (ERP), SE80, package, chaning a structure

Session 2, system B(ERP), SMW0 + download of a file

Session 3, system C(ERP), SMW0 + download a file

Session 4, system B(ERP), MB51, display result as an ALV

Session 5, system B(ERP), STMS + import of one transport into Q system

Session 6, system A(ERP), Z transaction /creating a price list using OLE Excel intregration

Session 7, system D (EWM), SE80, do some coding

Session 8, system D (EWM), /SCWM/MON, checking stock overview (ALV)

Session 9, system D (EWM), SE24, testing a class

Session 10, system D (EWM), opened ABAP debugger for session 9

Session 11, system B (ERP), SMQ2, running one queue

Session 12, system B (ERP), SNRO, changing interval for MATBELEG

Session 13, system B (ERP), MMPV, chaing period for one company code

Session 14, system D --> opened this session by pressing CTRL + '+' --> now fonts are corrupted

Regards

Michael

[michael_fallenbchel]

Hi Brian,

I have exactly the same problem on my local installation (I am working actually with the latest internal version of SAPGUI 770). Already opened a incident at SAP, but it is really hard to reproduce.

What I think it could be is opening a lot of sessions in different systems (I am a developer, so 2 times 3 ERP systems + 2 times 3 EWM systems + a gateway + ...), actually I have opened 16 sessions in 6 systems). Some coding, some customizing, some print previews in forms, some debugging, some ALV, ...and then I get the font error.

If you have any idea that could fix - pls update your post!

Good to see that I am not the only one 😉

Regards

Michael

[steven_verelst]

Hi michael.fallenbchel

I have a question: Did you have that issue when you had a debugging session open?

In our company it seems that it occurs only when people are debugging.

Regards,

Steven

[michael_fallenbchel]

Hi Steven,

that's indeed possible. Not 100% sure - as I am a developer, customizer, ...that's for sure an option. My feeling is - using TA SMARTFORMS is one of the things that is bringing the gui to broke down...

Will have an eye on it

Michael

[former_member694641]

Kindly Rollback the Inter Connectivity Process. It may help you.

[former_member1353120]

On the ActivateLogging, correct please if I am wrong.

This appears more suited to a security audit that logs a file for every user's actions versus a debug log to capture application faults or event log errors?

First, you have to enable and configure the Security Module

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\SAP\SAPGUI Front\SAP Frontend Server \Security]

That requires an https: path to a saprules.xml file.

This location must not contain the name saprules.xml, but only the path to the file (e.g. https://
myserver.mydomain/SAPGUI/rules, but not https://myserver.mydomain/SAPGUI/rules/
saprules.xml). See also note 2562697 for more information.

Then you configure which sets of rules are checked and processed

The registry value SecurityLevel is of the type REG_DWORD. In Strict Deny mode only the security module internal SAP rules will be processed. All action not allowed by an SAP rule will be denied. The REG_DWORD registry value Configuration can be used to confiJure which sets of rules will be considered during the check and in which order they will be processed.

Then set DefaultAction as to what happens IF no match to Rule exists.

Then set 0 or 1 relative to DisplayNotification

Then set ActivateLogging which depending on the option of Popup chosen the user may or may not see a popup and it is only logging Security related events.

It's part of a Central Repository for the overall Security Configuration.

-----------------
The font issue seems possibly more related to the Theme options. I see a lot of complaints about the Belize Theme.  The SAP GUI Admin Guide provides a way to set different themes using the HKLM Software settings.  This would be easy to set using Group Policy Preferences on the dedicated OU in Active Directory for SAP 760 Servers.

Like on page 13 of the SAP GUI Administrators Guide.
SAP Logon and SAP GUI sessions, which use default color settings configururation on the client machine and for which no SAP Signature, Blue Crystal or Belize color is defined on the SAP system, are shown in the default color. 

I know these can be set in the GUI as well which writes to HKEY Current User.

It doesn't say if setting the HKLM option overrides the HKCU option, however.

Does anyone have experience with the user of Themes as to which one might work best in a Citrix PVS Scenario?

Ref:
SAP GUI Administration
Setting SAP Signature, Blue Crystal and Belize Theme Color