I love PTF! With Selective Adoption, Continuous Delivery, and Customization Isolation strategies, PTF is more important than ever. Since Event Mapping, Drop Zones, and Page and Field Configurator don't appear on compare reports (and that is the point), we need a tool like PTF to expose regressions we would have found through the traditional retrofit analysis. The traditional retrofit approach required us to analyze and retrofit every customization. Event Mapping, Drop Zones, and Page and Field Configurator free us to focus on just what broke during the upgrade. And this is why PTF exists. The PTF regression test is how we find what broke. PTF is the linchpin that holds the whole isolated customization strategy together. Without it, we either go live with undiscovered errors or we continue to analyze and retrofit everything.
But what if you launch the PTF recorder and suddenly see this?
What happened? The PTF recorder is a Chrome/Edge plugin. That plugin needs to be loaded for the recorder to function. The PTF application attempts to install this plugin each time it launches the recorder. Depending on your enterprise settings, however, Chrome may deny that request. This is what happened to me. Enterprise customers have been dealing with this since PeopleSoft switched to the Chrome recorder. However, this is what surprised me: I'm simply using a standard Chrome download on an unmanaged server. In fact, PTF used to work just fine on this very server, and this behavior is a recent development. Perhaps Chrome altered its security policy?
Fortunately, this is a known and documented issue. Enterprise customers with highly controlled Chrome environments have been experiencing this issue since PTF switched to the Chrome recorder. Take a look at MOS Doc ID 2922127.1. This document outlines the steps necessary to correct the issue. Following those steps, I launched Chrome as an Administrator by:
- Typing Chrome into the Windows Menu and
- Right-clicking the Google Chrome entry and choosing Run as Administrator from the popup menu
I then navigated to chrome://extensions/ and turned on Developer Mode:
Finally, I dragged the Chrome extension psTstRecCh.crx file onto the Chrome extension window:
But after a restart, it still didn't work. I could now see the extension listed in Chrome, but it was disabled, and no matter how many times I clicked, it wouldn't enable itself!
Even though the extension was installed, Chrome wouldn't trust it. Even as an Administrator, I could not enable the extension. The final step is to override Chrome's behavior by encouraging it to trust Oracle's PTF extension. We do this through the Windows Registry. The appropriate Windows Registry keys are listed in PeopleBooks under Installing a PTF Client > Configuring Browser Settings. Here is the contents of my *.reg file I imported into my Windows Registry.
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Google\Chrome] [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Google\Chrome\ExtensionAllowedTypes] "1"="extension" [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Google\Chrome\ExtensionInstallAllowlist] "1"="boainbfkaibcfobfdncejkcbmfcckljh" [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Google\Chrome\ExtensionInstallBlocklist] "1"="*"
Please note that editing the Windows registry can be risky and potentially cause serious problems, including system instability or even rendering Windows unbootable. Therefore, it's crucial to proceed with extreme caution and only if you are confident in your actions. Always back up the registry before making any changes, and keep detailed records of modifications.
And that was all it took! My PTF recorder is now working as well as ever!
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