This is an announcement for the ELOG version 3.1.0 being released just now. Among several bug fixes and an improved Drag & Drop interface for attachments, it contains a long awaited "autosave" feature.

Let's assume that you write an ELOG entry, and keep the window open for a longer time (like to write some shift notes over several hours). If your browser crashes or closes for some reason, you will loose your entered text. To avoid that, ELOG starting from version 3.1.0 has an autosave feature. Whenever you enter some text, it is saved in the background as a draft message to the server. If your browser is closed by accident, you always can go back to the logbook, click "New" and ELOG will tell you that there is a draft message and asks you if you want to edit it. When you edit and regularly submit this message, it becomes a "normal" entry and the draft flas is removed. In addition to the background saving, there is now also a "Save" button so you can manually save your text to the draft entry.

I have tested this to some extent, but I might not have seen all browser/OS combinations, so in case there is a problem, please report it here.

Happy Easter,
Stefan

congrats, any detail changelog? I assume in software packages?

is it save just install and overwrite the old version?

The changelog is here: http://midas.psi.ch/elog/download/ChangeLog

It is save to install the new version over the old one.

I'm running ELOG since several years with rather heavy usage.
Last week I've upgrades from 3.0.0 to 3.1.0 and this week I had twice the same problem:
elogd lost the index for old entries and showed empty logbooks, without having restarted.
The logbooks appeared to be empty; new entries started with index "1".
The first time the origin of the problem were network troubles;
the second time it had been caused by a severe problem of our AFS file system service.
I never experienced this consequence for ELOG in the past when we had AFS problems.

Since the logbooks are used for the operation log of a user facility they continued to do new entries.
The next day I had to re-number the new entries and restart elogd and everything was fine.

I could understand if elogd crashes when the filesystem of the logbook goes away.
And when it restarts with an (temporarily) empty filesystem, that would explain what happened.
But it did not restart and the log file does not contain any information about any problem, 
just that suddenly all new entries in each logbook started with ID "1" again.

Stefan, any idea?
Anyone else ever experienced that with the new ELOG version (or older ones)?

First, I can only fix problems which are reproducible. Can we do another power outage at PSI again?

But seriously, I guess what happened is that elog sees an empty directory when the AFS server
goes down. If this happens, it rebuilds its internal (RAM based) indes, and sees no entries there.
So the next entry will be ID 1. That should be independent of the ELOG version. I guess if PSI
would have a power outage a year ago, you could have had the same problem.

I had problem some long time a go with AFS, where the network access blocked the program
for several minutes. I decided then to ONLY use local filesystems for elog servers, and do the
backup via rsync to an AFS account. Since then I never had problems.

Now it is hard for me to develop code which avoids the mentioned problem. I could maybe
check if there are many entries, and all over sudden there are no entries any more, the server
just stops with some detailed error message. But it is hard for me to mimic the AFS server 
outage. I can try to manually delete elog files and see what happens, but this only partially
mimics network problems.

/Stefan

> I'm running ELOG since several years with rather heavy usage.
> Last week I've upgrades from 3.0.0 to 3.1.0 and this week I had twice the same problem:
> elogd lost the index for old entries and showed empty logbooks, without having restarted.
> The logbooks appeared to be empty; new entries started with index "1".
> The first time the origin of the problem were network troubles;
> the second time it had been caused by a severe problem of our AFS file system service.
> I never experienced this consequence for ELOG in the past when we had AFS problems.
> 
> Since the logbooks are used for the operation log of a user facility they continued to do new entries.
> The next day I had to re-number the new entries and restart elogd and everything was fine.
> 
> I could understand if elogd crashes when the filesystem of the logbook goes away.
> And when it restarts with an (temporarily) empty filesystem, that would explain what happened.
> But it did not restart and the log file does not contain any information about any problem, 
> just that suddenly all new entries in each logbook started with ID "1" again.
> 
> Stefan, any idea?
> Anyone else ever experienced that with the new ELOG version (or older ones)?

We recently tried upgrading the ND280 elog instance to elog 3.1.0. [1] We seem to have some problems with this 'auto-save' functionality.  Specifically, it doesn't seem to play nice with the fact that we prefer to disable user's ability to edit old messages.  So we have (up to now), had the following set of commands specified in elogd.ccfg

Menu commands = List, New, Reply, Delete, Duplicate, Copy to, Move to, Find, Help

The problem is that we now get auto-saved messages, but no ability for the user to actually go back and finish the draft message.  You can see an example of this state in this test elog

http://neut17.triumf.ca:8080/demo/

Clicking on the draft message you can see that it can't be editted.  If you try to click 'new' then edit the draft, you get the message 'Error: Command "Edit" not allowed'.  So we had zombie draft messages, until we added the edit command back; but that defeats our preference that users not mess up old messages.

In general this auto-saving seems like a useful feature.  So the ideal solution for me would be to have some mode where users could edit/finish draft messages, but where we could still disable users from editting completed/finished messages.  Ie, where we can omit 'Edit' from the menu command, but still get auto-save.

A less ideal, but perhaps simpler solution would be that if an elog has omitted 'Edit' from the menu commands, then this auto-save/save functionality is disabled so that we don't get uneditable draft messages.

[1] https://midas.psi.ch/elogs/Forum/67855

Hi Thomas,

Menu commands = List, New, Reply, Delete, Duplicate, Copy to, Move to, Find, Help

The problem is that we now get auto-saved messages, but no ability for the user to actually go back and finish the draft message.  You can see an example of this state in this test elog

I changed the code such that editing of draft messages is always possible, even if the "edit" command is not allowed otherwise. Update is in GIT. Please check if that works at ND280.

Menu commands = List, New, Reply, Delete, Duplicate, Copy to, Move to, Find, Help

The problem is that we now get auto-saved messages, but no ability for the user to actually go back and finish the draft message.  You can see an example of this state in this test elog