EBS R12 -- Workflow Mailer DISCARD problem / actually IOS auto link (auto phone number recognition) problem

 Recently dealed with an interesting issue, which I want to share with you.

I was dealing with a workflow mailer problem.. Actually it was related with the inbound/IMAP..

The issue was occuring on some mobile users.. That is, they couldn't approve their notifications through their emails.

Actually, they were able to approve it, but the appropriate actions couldn't be taken in the system and the workflow notifications were staying in OPEN state.. It was obvious that, the workflow mailer wasn't able to perform its actions.

So, I set the loglevel to statement, reproduced the issue and checked the log..

The log was telling me the same generic story, that I don't want to dig in in this blog post, but I have written several blog posts about the workflow mailer and throubleshooting it. So if you want to get these kinds of details, please search by blog with the keywork "workflow"

Anyways, it was obvious that the problem was caused by a client issue, and that's why I decided to take a look at the mobile devices of the problematic users.. Those problematic users were all using Iphones and they got the latest updates.

They didn't any issue in approving/denying the notifications and sending the email responses. The users were trained and they were doing their jobs correctly.

However; when I checked the IMAP mail account. (IMAP mail account used by the Workflow mailer), I saw that those emails that were sent by these problematic users were sent to DISCARD folder.

Workflow mailer log was also verifying that in a little generic way..

The crucial thing was hidden in the emails.. I mean the emails that were sitting in the IMAP's DISCARD folder.. In the first glance, the format of those emails seemed correct. However; when we looked more closely at those emails sitting in the DISCARD folder of the IMAP account, we saw that; the NID numbers ( 7 digit numbers in our case) in those emails were converted into html links.

After analyzing further, we saw that, the mail transfer agent (actually the Mobile OS (IOS 1.4)) converts the NIDs in those approval emails to html links ( when the user approves a approval request (through email - imap) from its Mobile OS (IOS 14.1))

So IOS 14.1 in Iphone interprets 7 digit numbers as Mobile/Telephone numbers and converts those 7 digit numbers to html links. (it builds the links with the “tel:” prefix)

This was the reason behind this DISCARD behaviour.

We have analyzed the issue further (acutally there was no need to do that , but still:) by taking the actions given in the following MOS note; 

Oracle Workflow ATG Support: Java Mailer Setup Diagnostic Test (Doc ID 748421.1)

11i-12 Troubleshooting Workflow Java Notification Mailer - Technical Reference (Doc ID 1191125.1) 

At the end of the day, the issue was clear.

As for the solutions or workarounds, we thought about taken the following actions;

1) A customization in the mailer code.. (to make it ignore those a href attributes)

2) A patch for the workflow mailer.. (to ignore those a href attributes, to make Workflow mailer to ignore those “a href” tags and just read the NIDs intelligently)

3) This issue seemed to be caused by NIDs to be 7 digit numbers.. So if we could have 8 digit Workflow NIDs , the issue wouldn’t appear ).. So maybe we could increase the workflow NIDs in the system manually? For instance , currently the NID counter is at 3014900, we could increase this sequence manually to a 8 digit number (For instance to 10000000 and make workflow NIDs to continue from there)

4) Disablng this autolink feature in IOS..

Well, we have 4 solutions/workarounds, but none of them applied in this case.

We can't customize the mailer code, cause it is forbidden in the first place.

We can't apply a patch for workflow mailer , because there is no patch for this and the issue is actually not caused by Oracle.

We can't update the NID counter, because there is no documented way for doing that.. Actually, even if we can update it, this move will be an unsupported one.

We can't disable the autolink feature in IOS, cause there is no on/off switch for this feature -> https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8185290?answerId=32662540022

What do we do then?

Well , we can use some manual workarounds.. I mean we can teach the users to update the workflow emails before sending them back.. ( they can  just erase one digit and write that digit again..). Seems this works, as we don't get the a href attribute in the emails once we do this move .. However, this requires some manual actions and it is in the client side!

We can raise a SR to the Apple Support.. Actually, we will do that.. I will update you once we get response from Apple.. 

One other solution may be using Mobile Approvals Application..

This is the end of this interesting story :) I hope you find it useful..