During the installation of IBM Connections Touchpoint for a customer a stumbled upon an "issue" that is not (yet) covered in the documentation but is/will be an issue in the "real world™": "ssl-only environments" (properly: "tls-only"). The Connections documentation has a whole chapter called "Forcing traffic to be sent over an encrypted connection" on how to redirect all HTTP traffic to Connections to HTTPS (which you should do in times like these).

Unfortunately, as I learned the hard way, Touchpoint can't handle those redirects. What happens is the following error in the WAS logs:

 [17/04/XX 10:09:31:659 BST] 000000a1 SystemErr     R   [WebContainer : 5] ERROR com.ibm.issc.touchpoint.api.ProfilesAPIHelper - Failed to put image to Profiles API @ 'http://connections.example.com:80/profiles/photo.do?key=db2e25e1-8406-4945-b353-ee94049aeac1': Moved Permanently
 [17/04/XX 10:09:31:659 BST] 000000a1 SystemErr     R   org.apache.http.client.HttpResponseException: Moved Permanently

The error can also be found in the IHS logs.

What this basically means is that Touchpoint doesn't handle the redirect we set up on the IHS. So we have to tell Touchpoint to do it's work via https per default.

This is actually quite simple. All you have to do is add a few custom properties to the Ressource Environment Entry "REE Touchpoint Config".
Log into the ISC and navigate to "Resources -> Resource Environment -> Resource Environment Entries"



and select the "RRE Touchpoint Config " entry. Once you have that open, click "Custom Properties".

On that screen you should already have one entry for "profiles.app.entrypoint.host" from the installation. You now need to add the following values in order to force Touchpoint to talk with Connections via https:

 profiles.app.entrypoint.host    social.example.com
 profiles.app.entrypoint.scheme  https
 profiles.app.entrypoint.port    443

This should look something like this:



Now restart the WAS application server(s) (restarting the Touchpoint app was not enough in my case) and everything should just work.