Version Requirements

To run Confluence on Websphere, you will need to be running Confluence 1.4.2 or higher, against Websphere 5.1.1 with fixpack 3 or higher installed (5.1.1.3 or higher). There are known issues running Confluence against earlier versions of Websphere.

Websphere and Oracle

Confluence can not currently use Websphere datasources to access an Oracle database. This is because in order to effectively store pages in the database, Confluence needs access to the raw Oracle connection object, rather than the wrapper that Websphere places around it.

We are currently working on fixing this problem (CONF-3580), but for now the workaround is to not use a Websphere datasource. Use Confluence's internal connection pool instead (the "Direct JDBC Connection" option during setup).

Websphere on Windows platform

Most Windows OS have a file path limit of 255 characters. When an application is deployed with a long name, it is possible the deployed application files will reach this path limit. Currently, there is no check performed and the error messages when trying to create such long files are not very descriptive.
Example of installing Confluence on Windows XP Professional '02 sp 2. and Websphere App Server v 6.0 produced by default this deployed location: 

1) C:\Program Files\IBM\WebSphere\AppServer/profiles/default\wstemp\92668751\workspace\cells\bluetongueNode01Cell\applications\atlassian-confluence-2_2_8_war.ear\atlassian-confluence-2_2_8_war.ear

to get to the class structure of Confluence that needs to be used

2) atlassian-confluence-2_2_8.war\WEB-INF\classes\com\atlassian\confluence\user\actions\UserPickerAction$UsernameToUserTranslatingPaginationSupport

hence the length to that particular class 

$ perl -e 'print length "C:\Program Files\IBM\WebSphere\AppServer/profiles/defa
ult\wstemp\92668751\workspace\cells\bluetongueNode01Cell\applications\atlassian
-confluence-2_2_8_war.ear\atlassian-confluence-2_2_8_war\atlassian-confluence-2
_2_8.war\WEB-INF\classes\com\atlassian\confluence\user\actions\UserPickerAction
$UsernameToUserTranslatingPaginationSupport"';
264

and consequently an error which is produced when attempted to run Confluence 1) + 2):

*Cause:*
java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: com/atlassian/confluence/user/actions/UserPickerAction$UsernameToUserTranslatingPaginationSupport
at java.lang.Class.getDeclaredConstructors0(Native Method)

Troubleshooting

I can not view any Confluence page with a space in the title

Please see Fix 'Page Not Found' errors for pages with spaces in the title.

When I visit some URL, I get a blank page

This is a known issue, caused when you visit a page in Confluence that does not exist. Confluence's "Page Not Found" error page is not being displayed correctly by Websphere. For more information, please visit the issue in JIRA: CONF-3487.

I am having trouble with the £ and € characters

Confluence allows you to specify which character encoding should be used for its requests. To use the £ and € characters, you will need to use the "UTF-8" option. However, in some cases, WebSphere will encode the characters using ISO-8859-1 before they get to Confluence. If you have set the Confluence character encoding to "UTF-8" and are having problems, have a look at http://www-306.ibm.com/software/globalization/j2ee/encoding.jsp for an explaination of WebSphere and Character encoding. In particular, the -Dclient.encoding.override=UTF-8 system property allows you to override WebSpheres defaults.

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