Mac SmartView Login Issues Post OCI Upgrade

Oracle has recently upgraded / upgrading the classic environments to OCI Gen2 as part of different waves. If you are a Mac user and struggling to connect to the SmartView connection for the newly upgraded OCI environments then this blog is for you!!!

Connecting to smartview on Mac has a totally different approach and is not a straight forward process at all. I will try to cover all the steps as part of this blog but wouldn’t go into much details. If you have multiple applications to work with, you are required to have their own manifest file configuration and should be placed in a specific folder.

Now that my environments were upgraded, I find it difficult to connect with existing smartview setup I had with classic environments. Oracle has directions documented here on making smartview work for OCI environments and how the previously saved manifest file can be reutilised. However, I created them from scratch and got rid of the old ones but to my surprise I ended up with weird issues, lets deep dive:

When I first connected to my OCI upgraded environment using existing manifest, it just routed me to the browser without any login prompt.

Following the Oracle document, I recreated the manifest file.

Few points to note, the sequence in which the login URLs are to be added in the app domains list is:

1) Default login URL

2) Additional login URL

3) IDCS URL (for OCI environment)

The syntax of above are already covered in the Oracle docs however if you are wondering from where to get the domain URL or IDCS URL then try to login to the appropriate cloud service from browser which will give you that info like:

So the new manifest file looks like after adding the above 3 URLs to the App Domains list:

Once downloaded, I edited the Manifest file to amend the id in order to have the unique id to use it in the multiple manifest scenario. The reason being, if you plan to work with multiple manifests based on the same business process you must redefine the <Id> element within the XML file in order to differentiate the manifests. I just slightly changed the numbers in the id to make the files unique.

As mentioned above, this file needs to be placed in the specific folder named, ‘wef’, in order to have it recognized by Excel. The folder should exist under directory:

/Users/{username}/Library/Containers/com.microsoft.Excel/Data/Documents

Now the climax, I was expecting the login prompt now since everything is in place and it did appeared.

However, it again prompted me back to the browser showing similar error prompt ‘Last executed flow is not valid, close the browser and try again. Service id: fbP770b1650000000’. But open clicking Sign in again in the smartview panel, it prompted this time ‘You are already logged in.’

I just tried to click on Reload option under the ‘info’ icon a couple of times and guess what….it worked!!! Bingo

Please note it would prompt you ‘Authorization failed’, however, just ignore it and keep clicking Reload.

I will try to reach out to Oracle to log it as a bug but until its working I wouldn’t bother much.