I intend to create a script that updates one of our elog logbooks based on mails it receives. I was hoping to be able to do this using the "elog" command line tool. Adding a new entry works fine, as does "replying" to an existing entry. The only thing I cannot get to work is editing an existing entry. All entries ahve several attributes and I intend not to use the "message" itself. I tried the following (on the machine this elogd is running on):

1. Create a new entry with Attribute1 set to "value":
   

   elog -a 'Attribute1=value' -x -h localhost -l 'LOGBOOK' -p 8080 -u USER PASSWD

   This works - the entry gets created and is displayed properly.
   NOTE: I found that this does not work if LOGBOOK has any spaces in it - I would get error messages where the logbook was not found.
    
2. Edit this entry to set a second attribute:

   elog -e 1 -a 'Attribute2=something' -x -h localhost -l 'LOGBOOK' -p 8080 -u USER PASSWD

   The result was: Error transmitting message. Running the same command with -v gives me a whole bunch of text with at the end this message (I've stripped the HTML): "This entry has in meantime been modified by someone else. Submitting it now would overwrite the other modification and is therefore prohibited." However, I know for certain that this entry is not being editied by anyone at that moment, so I'm wondering what I'm doing wrong here...

Also, I have a second, related question: Editing by the ID of the entry seems to be the only way of editing an entry - this makes it a bit difficult for me, as all entries already have a unique ID (which is defined as one of the attributes) that is non-numerical and not sequential. What is the easiest way to retrieve an ID from the command line (basically something like: "What ID has the entry with Attribute1==NAME?")? Is it possible at all? Otherwise, I would not be able to automatically edit the entries, as I don't know which is which... :-}

I fixed two things:

• The logbook can now contain a space. Enclose it in double quotes such as elog -l "LOG BOOK" ...
• The error you report comes from the fact that you are the first person using elog submissions together with "use lock=1" in the configuration file. This has never been tested and therefore does not work . So I fixed this by adding a new hidden parameter. If you update to SVN revision 2122, things should work

Concerning your request of editing existing entries by their idea, I agree with Yoshi that you could grab the ID upon the first submission. An alternative is to make a direct search on a logbook. Since this is not implemented in the elog command line tool, you have to use wget for it:

wget "http://localhost:8080/LOGBOOK/?mode=raw&Attribute1=something" -O elog.txt

A problem here is that the username and password are normally transmitted in an encrypted form as cookies by your browser after you logged in. Now you have to convince wget first to log in like

wget "http://localhost:8080/LOGBOOK/?unamee=USER&upassword=PASSWD"--save-cookies cookies.txt

followed by a second call to wget with --load-cookies cookies.txt. I tried that but was not successful since the login procedure above redirects to the elog listing page, and only the cookies set after the redirection were saved in cookies.txt. Maybe you can figure out how to do that. The only way I could get it to work is to supply the encoded password, which I manually obtained from the password file. The URL was then

wget "http://localhost:8080/LOGBOOK/?mode=raw&Attribute1=something&unm=USER&upwd=ENC_PWD" -O elog.txt

With SSL enabled, I'd like to to grab the CN (Common Name) of the user certificate and use that as login authentication method.

I am thinking of the following scenario:

- users with read & write privileges need to have an SSL certificate loaded in their browser. The "Author" field will be pre-set to the CN of the user certificate.

- authorization may be subject to further granularity (e.g. only allow users whose certificate belongs to a certain organization)

- read-only, guest access (without certificate) may or may not be allowed

Is there a way to do that?