Andreas Gehrke

Software architect and .NET developer

This post describes a problem with Web API in Sitecore 8.1 Update-2, causing all Web API controllers to return “An error has occurred.” error message on CD-servers. You can skip to my temporary solution at the end, if you experience the same issue.

I have previously written about Sitecore.Services.Client and use of ServicesControllerAttribute for easy implementation of Web API in a Sitecore solution - without any pipeline and routing configuration. After upgrading to Sitecore 8.1 Update-2, and reapplying the tedious manual work of enabling/disabling config files for CD-servers, I found that all our Web API controllers failed with a An error has occurred error message. Here’s the full exception message returned by Web API after disabling customErrors in web.config:

What first caught my eye was that the stack trace contained non of our custom code, and that the error was happening deep inside Sitecore and Web Api. I was hitting a custom controller and not anything related to ExperienceAnalytics, which the stack trace could indicate at first glance.

Here’s what I wrote in a ticket to Sitecore Support:

From the exception stack trace I have narrowed down the issue to Sitecore.Services.Infrastructure.Web.Http.Dispatcher.NamespaceHttpControllerSelector.InitializeControllerDictionary(), which instantiates a HttpControllerDescriptor for each API controller found in any referenced assembly. Some API controllers in the Sitecore.ExperienceAnalytics.dll assembly are decorated with Sitecore.ExperienceAnalytics.Api.Http.Filters.NotFoundExceptionFilterAttribute. This attribute contains a parameterless constructor that is called by internals of ASP.NET Web API. However the constructor calls Sitecore.ExperienceAnalytics.Api.ApiContainer.GetLogger() which tries to create an object based on what is defined in an experienceAnalytics/api/logger configuration element. This element does not exist as it’s defined in Sitecore.ExperienceAnalytics.WebAPI.config, which should be disabled on CD servers.

My (temporary) solution

I have resolved the issue by deleting three Sitecore.ExperienceAnalytics assemblies on CD-servers:

  • Sitecore.ExperienceAnalytics.Client.dll
  • Sitecore.ExperienceAnalytics.dll
  • Sitecore.ExperienceAnalytics.ReAggregation.dll

This prevents the code in InitializeControllerDictionary() to find and instantiate the problematic controllers and filters for ExperienceAnalytics.

Update May 11: Sitecore documentation updated

On May 11th I received information Sitecore Support that they had updated documentation about configuring CD servers. Now, this article has the following:

xAnalytics assembly files

If you have implemented custom code that uses ASP.NET Web API attribute routing, to avoid errors we recommend that you disable the following .dll files in the \Website\bin folder:

  • Sitecore.ExperienceAnalytics.dll
  • Sitecore.ExperienceAnalytics.Client.dll
  • Sitecore.ExperienceAnalytics.ReAggregation.dll

Updated:

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