Connecting Usage Meter with NSX Manager fails or invalid XML character error while processing an API response

Products

• VMware Aria Suite
• VMware NSX Networking

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

• Connecting Usage Meter with NSX Manager fails.
• You see this error:
  
  Character reference "&#x8" is an invalid XML character.
          at org.apache.xerces.util.ErrorHandlerWrapper.createSAXParseException(Unknown Source)

Environment

VMware NSX for vSphere 6.3.x

Cause

The issue occurs when an NSX object is created through the User Interface (UI) which contains invalid XML characters. When any client of the NSX Manager calls the NSX Manager API to access the object response, the API response contains the invalid XML character. Any processing on the invalid XML response on the client side fails due to the parse error.

Resolution

This issue is resolved in VMware NSX for vSphere 6.3.7, available at VMware Downloads.

Workaround:
To work around this issue, do not use invalid xml character in the NSX object while creating any object from the User Interface (UI).
 
XML Payload of NSX-v API supports character set supported by XML 1.0 standard. As per the XML 1.0 standard, the supported character range is #x9 | #xA | #xD | [#x20-#xD7FF] | [#xE000-#xFFFD] | [#x10000-#x10FFFF].

Notes:

• Usage of any non-supported character in API payload may result in XML parse error causing API to fail .
• While creating NSX object through the User Interface, any user input property of the object should contain only valid characters from the above mentioned character range. For more information, see Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0 (Fifth Edition).

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