Salesforce Exception: Failed to get next element / only whitespace content allowed

[oliver5]

We are unfortunately getting sporadic talend exceptions from the Salesforce Connector when upserting data to Salesforce. This exception seems to occur randomly and it seems it has nothing to do with the data being transferred, because a second attempt on the same data set will not run into an exception.

It seems, that there is some kind of library issue, which is quite hard for for us to debug, because we cannot reproduce this issue when running the job in talend studio. Is there a recommendation of what we can do to find out what's causing this issue?

This is the full exception: https://pastebin.com/KRjgyQHb

tSalesforceOutput_1 com.sforce.ws.ConnectionException: Failed to get next element

java.io.IOException: com.sforce.ws.ConnectionException: Failed to get next element

   at org.talend.components.salesforce.runtime.SalesforceWriter.doUpsert(SalesforceWriter.java:476)

[...]

Caused by: com.sforce.ws.ConnectionException: Failed to get next element

   at com.sforce.ws.parser.XmlInputStream.nextTag(XmlInputStream.java:169)

[...]

Caused by: com.sforce.ws.parser.XmlPullParserException: only whitespace content allowed before start tag and not u (position: START_DOCUMENT seen u... @1:1)

   at com.sforce.ws.parser.MXParser.parseProlog(MXParser.java:1532) ~[force-wsc-53.1.0.jar:?]

[...]

[LucMas]

Hello @oliver5  

Have you been able to identify the root cause of the issue and, more importantly, have you fixed it ? and how? We are also experiencing the same problem.

Thank's

[oliver5 · Accepted solution]

Hey @LucMas,

Yeah, the issue was a Salesforce API issue. We escalated the issue with their DevOps team, as the Salesforce API was sometimes returning 503 status code, which caused this error in Talend. Talend couldn't do anything for us here, so we've rebuilt our jobs and added our own retry mechanism for failed jobs..

[LucMas]

Thank's @oliver5   

Have you resolved the issue on your end? Also, what is the version of the API that you are using, please?

[LucMas]

Also, have you openend a request to the salesforce team ? if yes, can you please give me the request number ? because I too have opened a request to Salesforce and I can use your request number to strenghten my request.

Thank's @oliver5 

[oliver5]

@LucMas 

Unfortunately I cannot share a request number as the ticket has already been closed. Are you sure you have the exact same problem? There are many possible sources for this particular error. If you also see a 503 response from Salesforce, I would create a new ticket. For example, you can create a script that checks the accessibility of your instance every 30 seconds using curl:

curl -I --connect-timeout 0 https://[your-instance].my.salesforce.com

So as you can see, this had nothing to do with the API version being used on salesforce. This was a problem with our whole Salesforce instance, which rejected some of our requests (which also included API requests).