What Is the 3DEXPERIENCE Launcher?

Overview

Installing a native app automatically installs the 3DEXPERIENCE launcher. The launcher menu is created in the Windows system tray. End users can then use the launcher menu to launch their native app.

The 3DEXPERIENCE platform communicates with the 3DEXPERIENCE Launcher through the HTTPS protocol on a given port.

During the installation of the 3DEXPERIENCE Launcher, the following operations are performed:

selection of the port
declaration of the local server in the %SystemRoot%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts file; note that the file must be accessible in read/write mode before installing the launcher
registration of an SSL certificate.

Note: The installation of the 3DEXPERIENCE Launcher requires Administrator rights.

Diagnostic Tool

The 3DEXPERIENCE launcher can be installed on a wide variety of machines and network configurations. If your network is incorrectly configured, it may be difficult to resolve these issues and launch the 3DEXPERIENCE. The role of the diagnostic tool is to help you to identify the origin of the issues and fix them.

To launch the diagnostic tool, open the 3DEXPERIENCE Launcher Options dialog box, select the Diagnostic tab, then click the Run diagnostic button:

It performs multiple checks, for example:

3DEXPERIENCE Launcher service up and running
valid registry state
valid hosts file state
SSL certificate correctly installed and bound to the port
port connections
3DEXPERIENCE Launcher URL properly resolved
successful connection to the Launcher.

The following problems may occur:


Problem	Description	Solution
All default ports are busy	The installer will try to select the first free port among 20300, 33200 and 40600 (in this order). In the unlikely event where those three ports will all be busy, it will elect a random free port. Whatever the port used, its number will be displayed in "About" section when you right-click the menu of the system tray icon.	If the port used by the 3DEXPERIENCE Launcher is not among the three default ones, you will have to enter it in the appropriate field in the troubleshooting section of the 3DEXPERIENCE platform dialog box.
The firewall blocks all ports	Certain firewalls can be configured to block all ports, even for communication between processes within the same machine.	The ports 20300, 33200 and 40600 should be opened for local communication.
Hosts file protection	The two following lines are added to the hosts file during installation: 127.0.0.1 dslauncher.3ds.com ::1 dslauncher.3ds.com They allow the `dslauncher.3ds.com` URL to resolve to the local machine, for both the IPV4 and IPV6 protocols. Certain anti-virus products may try to protect the `hosts` file from non-legitimate modifications. Some may even silently revert from any modifications made to this file.	Depending on your anti-virus product, you must make sure that those two lines are declared in the `hosts` file.
The proxy is configured in such a way that ALL http/https request must go through it	The 3DEXPERIENCE Launcher does issue some http communications to the internet. These should go through the proxy if a proxy has been set up. This should not cause any problem. The 3DEXPERIENCE platform needs to communicate with the 3DEXPERIENCE Launcher by sending https requests to the dslauncher.3ds.com address. Those are purely local and should not leave the machine. In this case, the HTTP requests to `dslauncher.3ds.com` will be sent to the proxy. But this address is not known by any DNS or the proxy itself. So, all the requests will fail with a 404 error.	There are two solutions to solve this issue: If the proxy configuration is centralized through a pac file, modify it so that all addresses resolving to `127.0.0.1` or `::1` (loopback addresses) do not go through the proxy. Or, explicitly exclude `dslauncher.3ds.com` from being sent to the proxy.

Note the following limitations:

Firefox configuration is not tested (connection settings should be set to Use system proxy settings anyway).
For a proxy pac configuration, the existence of the IPV6 localhost bypass (dnsResolve(host) == "::1") cannot be tested (due to a Windows API limitation).