Topic
After Salesforce Spring '21 release, some users could not see Skuid pages and instead saw an error: “The Visualforce Page VFSessionId is part of the AppExchange Package Skuid, and requires a license to use”
Resolution
Ultimately the issue was not caused by changes in the Spring '21 release. The affected user’s Skuid package licenses had been revoked through an unrelated automation setting configured by the client around the same time as the Salesforce release, so granting new Skuid licenses resolved the problem.
Problem Details
At around the time of the Salesforce Spring ‘21 release, several users began seeing an error when trying to view a Skuid-in-Visualforce page.
Not all users were affected.
The affected users still had the Skuid Page Viewer permission set.
Resolution Process
First, we verified that the affected users did not have a Skuid license. Granting licenses to these users resolved the issue, but we did not know why the licenses had been removed. Knowing the root cause is important for avoiding possible recurrences of the problem, so we continued our investigation.
There are automation options for Skuid licenses and permission sets in the Skuid App. (See these under Settings > User Licensing / Permissions.) Here we saw that “Auto Revoke Licenses on Deactivation” was enabled, but the “Auto Assign Licenses on Activation” option was not. It's possible that the affected users were deactivated in Salesforce, then reactivated. Hypothesis: With the auto-assign settings in this state, a reactivated user wouldn’t automatically get their Skuid license back.
To confirm the hypothesis, we reviewed the Setup Audit Trail for this org to see if the affected users were deactivated and reactivated. We did not see any record of the affected users being deactivated or reactivated.
As we looked through the audit trail for references to the affected users and the Skuid managed package, we found log entries showing that their Skuid package licenses had been revoked. We also saw that these Skuid licenses had been revoked several days prior to the org’s Spring ‘21 update. This indicated that the Salesforce release was not related to the issue. We used https://status.salesforce.com/ to find out when the org’s instance was updated to Spring ‘21.
Outcome
The org’s setup audit trail also showed the name of the user that had revoked the licenses. Our client explained that this user account was actually being used for some automations and integrations they had set up in their org, so it wasn’t clear why the account would have revoked the licenses. Further investigation into these integrations would be necessary.
While we drew no concrete conclusions on why the licenses were revoked, we were able to determine that there was no license-related issue in the Salesforce Spring ‘21 release that might have affected Skuid customers, and we confirmed the Skuid package’s automation settings were behaving as expected. So, no further action was needed regarding the client’s Skuid setup.
Additional Information
Although users who need to see Skuid pages require the Skuid Page Viewer permission set, this is not enough. Package licenses are always necessary. See Skuid documentation on licenses and permission assignments.
Skuid provides settings for automatically assigning and revoking both licenses and permission sets. These are often overlooked, but can be important. More troubleshooting guidance on this is documented here.
The Setup Audit Trail is a very useful tool for reviewing administrative changes in a Salesforce org. It can help clarify the timing of certain administrative events, and provides breadcrumbs for digging deeper into the events. Here, it also helped uncover a custom automation that was a key part of the issue.
Establishing a clear timeline is helpful for a number of reasons. Here, it helped narrow down the list of possible causes for the issue at hand, and showed that the scope of the issue was much smaller than we originally suspected.
Get help with an issue
- Ask in the Skuid question forum.
- If you have a support entitlement, ask your question in Nintex Customer Central.