Troubleshooting "Multiple active instances found for the item attributes provided..." Errors In Install Base (Doc ID 1495209.1)

Last updated on JUNE 21, 2023

Applies to:

Purpose

One of the most common transaction errors seen in Install Base is "Multiple active instances found for the item attributes provided...". A simple search of the knowledge base will return at least 12 different notes relating to this error which contain causes and solutions rangeing from setup issues and bugs to a number of data fix routines. The aim of this note is to provide a consolidated guide to resolving this error. The note contains a step by step solution for the error with variations depending on the release.

The error itself occurs when, during transaction processing in Install Base, the code performs a query to identify the instance that needs to be updated by the current transaction. The query that is executed depends on the transaction information (which provides things like the location where the instance is expected to be found) and the item setup in Inventory (which provides the criteria such as serial, lot and revision control). Based on this a query is executed which expects to find just one item instance that answers the search criteria. When multiple instances are found this error is generated.

There are a number of reasons why this error can occur:

- The may be 'genuine' duplicate instances for non-serialized items. This situation can occur due to incorrect setup (for example incorrect SFM setup causing one transaction to be processed more than once) or other data issues (corruption due to incorrect data migration or data fixes for example). Install Base expects that for non-serialized items there is only ever a maximum of 1 active instance of the item in any unique location. This instance can have a quantity of 1 or more. If there are a multiple active instances of the same item in the same location then this error will occur. To resolve cases such as this we have data fix scripts designed to merge the multiple non-serialized instances into 1 single instance per unique location with a quantity equal to the total quantity of all the unmerged instances.

- The may be code bugs which cause the validation code to run a query with incorrect selection criteria. So, for example, if an item is defined as being serial and revision controlled but the validation query does not include the revision within it's criteria then this error can occur because there may be multiple instances of the same item but with different revision numbers and these would not be differentiated between by the query. For all known bug causes of this error there are patch fixes available and these are documented in this note in the Troubleshooting Steps section below.

- The issue can occur due to changes of item setup which can cause the validation code to run the incorrect query. For example, if an item has it's serial control changed in the time between when the transaction is created in the source system (eg Inventory) and when it is processed by Install Base, then the validation query will be based on incorrect information (there will be a discrepancy between the transaction information and the current item information) which can lead to this error.

Troubleshooting Steps

My Oracle Support provides customers with access to over a million knowledge articles and a vibrant support community of peers and Oracle experts.