Debugging why the Management Portal fails to load images

In the WRC, we often see customers raise questions regarding a new Web Gateway setup where the Management Portal half-loads, but doesn’t show images. This article will explain why this error occurs, as well as how to fix it. This explanation is focused on the Web Gateway serving InterSystems IRIS instances, but the same explanation should apply to the CSP Gateway serving Caché instances as well.

The Problem:

You just installed the Web Gateway on a stand-alone Web Server. When you go to load the Management Portal, you find that it cannot display or load images, like so:

Why this happens:

The issue is that in order to load the Management Portal in full, InterSystems IRIS has to load a number of .js, .css, and .png files (Static Files). If you are seeing a Management Portal page like above, please feel free to open your Browser's Developer Tools applet, navigate to the Network tab, and confirm that various .js, .css, and .png components are not being served:

When the Web Gateway is initially installed, we set up mappings for only the following extensions:

                .csp        .cls          .zen       .cxw

These are the types of file extensions that customers are going to be using most often for their own custom applications, plus the .cxw extension which is used for serving the Web Gateway Management Portal. If you want to load the additional Management Portal components, you are going to have to register additional file types to be served by the Web Gateway.

How to fix the problem:

To get the Management Portal to display fully, you must configure the Web Gateway to serve additional file types. For IIS, you can either add individual mappings for .js, .png, .css, etc. extensions, or you can add a wildcard mapping. The documentation for Registering Additional File Types for IIS can be found here: https://docs.intersystems.com/irislatest/csp/docbook/Doc.View.cls?KEY=GCGI_win#GCGI_registering

If you are running the Web Gateway on top of Apache on a Unix / Linux system, you have a couple of options. You can either configure this by adding additional file extensions as is the case on IIS, or you can add a CSP location directive. Please see the documentation here for full details: https://docs.intersystems.com/irislatest/csp/docbook/Doc.View.cls?KEY=GCGI_ux, under "Registering Additional File Types with CSP"