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Tridion Explorer reports System.ServiceModel.ServiceActivationException

Posted by Dominic Cronin at Dec 15, 2012 08:50 PM |
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I'd been noticing strange messages popping up in the message centre of the SDL Tridion Explorer. The messages were about some service call failing with a 500 status and System.ServiceModel.ServiceActivationException, and seemed to be coming from various service points under C:\Program Files (x86)\Tridion\web\WebUI\Models\TCM54\Services. Here's an example:

/WebUI/Core/Services/Communicator.svc/Invoke failed to execute. STATUS(500): System.ServiceModel.ServiceActivationException

Not all the time, just occasionally when I did certain things. The thing that got me irritated enough to do something about it was when I wanted to delete a list of old versions of some items, and the multiple items functionality was breaking, and throwing up these messages. I could delete them one item at a time, but not all together. I suspect you can get problems with other things too, looking at the list of services that are served the same way from Models\TCM54\Services, and I think I remember also having problems with publishing and where-used.

A bit of Googling pointed me in the right direction, and I ended up after a couple of false starts editing: C:\Program Files (x86)\Tridion\web\WebUI\WebRoot\Web.Config

What you need to do to fix the problem is to add some configuration to get WCF to behave properly. On my, now working, system, it looks like this, but YMMV.
<serviceHostingEnvironment>
  <baseAddressPrefixFilters>
    <add prefix="http://localhost/"/>
  </baseAddressPrefixFilters>
</serviceHostingEnvironment>
Actually - once you're poking around in the web.config file, it's pretty easy, because it turns out that Tridion have already included the relevant configuration, commented out.
It may be that it's also called out in the installation documentation, and that I've missed it. Anyway - joining up the dots between the symptoms and this particular piece of config isn't so obvious, and it's always possible that you set up your system correctly and then add a new name binding in IIS, So therefore this "note to self" post, which will maybe help me to remember the extra step that's needed. And it can't hurt to have the cause and solution in close proximity in a Googleable location. :-)