Skip to main content
pascal_kardex1-Visitor
1-Visitor
Jul 18, 2017 11:13 AM UTC
Question

Encountered an error retrieving a Thing in Composer

Dear all. We constantly receive the error "encountered an error retrieving <Thing>" when opening the composer when the server runs for a certain amount of time. Restarting the Tomcat and recreating the thing helps. However we are productive now and cannot restart the server every 48 hours. What should be done?

On the Frontend of Utilities when a Thing shows this behavior, we cannot change the properties, e.g. we cannot change the alerts.

There is nothing concrete in the application log. The Error is empty.

Help Appreciated.

4 replies

CRArko5-Regular Member
5-Regular Member
Jul 18, 2017 1:37 PM UTC

Hello, Pascal.

You might be encountering a 'ghost entity' in ThingWorx. The below article describes how these are created, how they can be detected, and possibly prevented.

https://support.ptc.com/appserver/cs/view/solution.jsp?n=CS198580

Check that out and see if it is helpful with this.

-- Craig A.

Translate
ankigupta5-Regular Member
5-Regular Member
Jul 19, 2017 3:26 AM UTC

Hi Pascal Waldvogel​,

Are these Things created by some Code or manually from Composer? If it created by code/service; it could be an issue of Ghost entities as suggested by Craig.

Translate
pascal_kardex1-VisitorAuthor
1-Visitor
Jul 20, 2017 8:54 AM UTC

Hi Ankit Gupta​, they are created manually. It must be from the services as we added quite the complex ones.

What I don't understand, why is Thingworx not globally including a fallback that this shouldn't happen? Why are WE responsible to make sure that ghost entities are not created?

Is there anything done about this?

There is absolutely NO way of telling which service is making this - as there is NO log

An Advice?

Translate
visla14-Alexandrite
14-Alexandrite
Mar 9, 2018 2:58 PM UTC

Customer confirmed this was not related to Ghost Entities (they don't create Entities programmatically and "Ghost Entities Cleaner" was not finding any Ghost Entity when issue was occurring).

They solved the issue on their own and this community thread can be closed.

Translate
Terms & ConditionsAccessibility statement