Serious, intermittent errors with CF Web Service

Question

We\'ve got an incredibly frustrating situation with a CF Web Services-based API that we wrote and maintain. We had an API in place for years that was stable and working happily

Answer 1

How are the external clients interacting with your webservice? Just via the WSDL I presume?

Is it possible that some client app, a unit test... something, anything ... has a wrong URL... has a URL to your WSDL file with the "tafkan" in it?

If I were working on it, probably the first avenue I'd look down would be figuring out what could possibly result in that problem. Is "tafkan" a valid directory in your system? Where do the .cfc files actually live on the file system, what if any mappings are there to these paths in CF Admin, and what are the URLs that people are using to access your webservice?

The key here, I believe, is getting inside CF's head and asking it "why would you generate, and be looking for, a class with "tafkan" as a package?

Answer 2

I've read this thread, and the CFTalk thread. My initial thoughts about workarounds appear to have been already suggested by Mark Kruger and Dave Watts. The only other workaround idea I had was to catch the error and refresh the webservice stub using the Service Factory methods. (In CF8-9 there is a Admin API method to do this, not sure about CF7).

Researching the error I narrowed down possible matches to these:

http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-talk/message.cfm/messageid:144821 This was a match but unresolved

http://blog.coldfusionpowered.com/?p=28 This was a very similar error, resolved by "fixing case issues" on all CFCs & invocations.

ColdFusion Google Adwords Business Component Error Resolved by rewriting code and removing cfcomments (I suspect that other factors were actually responsible for solving it here)

http://forums.crystaltech.com/index.php?topic=22364.0 We're getting closer now. Resolution involved mistakenly having two document roots

http://qaix.com/coldfusion/313-410-web-service-on-cfmx-6-1-jrun-suddenly-not-working-read.shtml Exact match for error message. Exact match for having CFC mapping to doc root. Resolution was to have only 1 mapping pointing to docroot, just "/". This could be the solution. In MX 6/6.1 and maybe 7, there was a default mapping for "/" pointing to docroot. If you have another mapping pointing to docroot, then I can see how this problem might arise. Check the physical paths for mappings and try the solution here, to use only the "/" mapping.