Android Mobile Backend Starter fail with 404 not found... some times

Question

Last afternoon I created a project and deployed the mobile backend started. I edited the client code and sucessfully did some data insertion.

Some time (hours) after, I changed the cliend code again and the insertion failed with the error:

com.google.api.client.googleapis.json.GoogleJsonResponseException: 404 Not Found

As I didn't did any substantial change in the code I concluded that the error was on the app engine side so I redeployed the project and that solved the problem. The insertions came through again.

This morning I was back with the 404 error. This time redeploying didn't work.

The error log I get in the app engine is:

Uncaught exception from servlet
javax.servlet.UnavailableException: com.google.api.server.spi.config.ApiConfigException: <Entity [GoogleCloudEndpointConfiguration("EndpointV1")]:
    clientIds = null
    audiences = null
>
.audiences was not of type String or List<String>.
    at org.mortbay.jetty.servlet.ServletHolder.makeUnavailable(ServletHolder.java:415)
    at org.mortbay.jetty.servlet.ServletHolder.initServlet(ServletHolder.java:451)
    at org.mortbay.jetty.servlet.ServletHolder.getServlet(ServletHolder.java:339)
    at org.mortbay.jetty.servlet.ServletHolder.handle(ServletHolder.java:487)
    at org.mortbay.jetty.servlet.ServletHandler$CachedChain.doFilter(ServletHandler.java:1166)
    at com.google.apphosting.utils.servlet.ParseBlobUploadFilter.doFilter(ParseBlobUploadFilter.java:125)
    at org.mortbay.jetty.servlet.ServletHandler$CachedChain.doFilter(ServletHandler.java:1157)
    at com.google.apphosting.runtime.jetty.SaveSessionFilter.doFilter(SaveSessionFilter.java:35)
    at org.mortbay.jetty.servlet.ServletHandler$CachedChain.doFilter(ServletHandler.java:1157)
    at com.google.apphosting.utils.servlet.JdbcMySqlConnectionCleanupFilter.doFilter(JdbcMySqlConnectionCleanupFilter.java:57)
    at org.mortbay.jetty.servlet.ServletHandler$CachedChain.doFilter(ServletHandler.java:1157)
    at com.google.apphosting.utils.servlet.TransactionCleanupFilter.doFilter(TransactionCleanupFilter.java:43)
    at org.mortbay.jetty.servlet.ServletHandler$CachedChain.doFilter(ServletHandler.java:1157)
    at org.mortbay.jetty.servlet.ServletHandler.handle(ServletHandler.java:388)
    at org.mortbay.jetty.security.SecurityHandler.handle(SecurityHandler.java:216)
    at org.mortbay.jetty.servlet.SessionHandler.handle(SessionHandler.java:182)
    at org.mortbay.jetty.handler.ContextHandler.handle(ContextHandler.java:765)
    at org.mortbay.jetty.webapp.WebAppContext.handle(WebAppContext.java:418)
    at com.google.apphosting.runtime.jetty.AppVersionHandlerMap.handle(AppVersionHandlerMap.java:266)
    at org.mortbay.jetty.handler.HandlerWrapper.handle(HandlerWrapper.java:152)
    at org.mortbay.jetty.Server.handle(Server.java:326)
    at org.mortbay.jetty.HttpConnection.handleRequest(HttpConnection.java:542)
    at org.mortbay.jetty.HttpConnection$RequestHandler.headerComplete(HttpConnection.java:923)
    at com.google.apphosting.runtime.jetty.RpcRequestParser.parseAvailable(RpcRequestParser.java:76)
    at org.mortbay.jetty.HttpConnection.handle(HttpConnection.java:404)
    at com.google.apphosting.runtime.jetty.JettyServletEngineAdapter.serviceRequest(JettyServletEngineAdapter.java:146)
    at com.google.apphosting.runtime.JavaRuntime$RequestRunnable.run(JavaRuntime.java:439)
    at com.google.tracing.TraceContext$TraceContextRunnable.runInContext(TraceContext.java:480)
    at com.google.tracing.TraceContext$TraceContextRunnable$1.run(TraceContext.java:487)
    at com.google.tracing.TraceContext.runInContext(TraceContext.java:774)
    at com.google.tracing.TraceContext$DoInTraceContext.runInContext(TraceContext.java:751)
    at com.google.tracing.TraceContext$AbstractTraceContextCallback.runInInheritedContextNoUnref(TraceContext.java:342)
    at com.google.tracing.TraceContext$AbstractTraceContextCallback.runInInheritedContext(TraceContext.java:334)
    at com.google.tracing.TraceContext$TraceContextRunnable.run(TraceContext.java:484)
    at com.google.apphosting.runtime.ThreadGroupPool$PoolEntry.run(ThreadGroupPool.java:251)
    at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:722)

Any idea what is happening and what can I do to solve it?

Answer 1

I do not completely understand what is going on, but I found a way to get rid of the 404 errors on the client side, which are caused by the App Engine side not responding. The errors reported in the app engine logs are talking about audience and client ids for the app. Those are the values you set when you configure authentication for "Secured by Client Ids".

I found that if I put in some placeholder string values in there, saved, and then went back to "Open (for development use only)" and saved again, the app engine would no longer have config errors and would response to the client Android app.

At the moment I am only to the place where entries are made in the Guestbook data. But this definitely got me started again. I am hoping that if I set up authentication completely that the problem will not come back.