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

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

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

Ok, I fixed this in the current GIT version. You might check if that works for you.

This problem has been fixed in Version 3.1.0-2. Please upgrade.

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)?