ELOG Forum

Hi,

I was wondering if anybody else seen this problem and maybe has a solution. I use Elog version 2.7.5 rev. 2172 that I compiled from the tar.gz package on a Ubuntu PC. It is very strange that everything works fine except I can not view / download PDF attachments specifically. I can view / download images and I can download all sorts of file formats: xls, doc, ppt, etc. Viewing in the same window / tab or in a different one does not work. Saving the attachment produces a file empty file with the correct name! This is so strange, for example following a link from an image or any other attachment type works but if that link is a PDF file I get an empty page! When uploading a PDF file there a thumbnails that are generated, I do view the thumbnail but not the PDF itself! I didn't even managed to start a download on PDF attachment.

Any help would be appreciated!

This sounds to me like you have a problem on your browser. I know that Acrobat Reader sometimes causes problems. The current version always crashes my broswer, so I cannot display PDFs inline, I rather have to same them, and the open them for display. Maybe you have a simlar problem. Since you see the PDF thumbnails, I believe that the PDF operations indise ELOG are ok. Can you view PDFs from other websites? Have you tried another browser? Maybe on another computer?

- Stefan

Hi,

Thanks for the reply. I just checked the access from two other computers and indeed it works. I tried to see what is the problem with my browser, I use Firefox 3.0.6 and tried to get a PDF from the web. So I do have the same problem with other sites for viewing a PDF, I mean when I click on a PDF link I get a white page and the browser does not invoke any plug-in or Acrobat Reader. But the major difference with Elog is that with other sites I can always right click on the link and do "Save as" and it starts the download and I get a valid file. With elog it does start the download but I get an empty file. Actually I checked inside and it is not really empty, it is a text file, here I attached an example (the content of the file when I tried to download a PDF from the Elog server):

gornea@hadriana ~
$ cat Ba_source_GG_Feb09.pdf
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html><head>
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW">
<title>ELOG Login</title>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="default.css">
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="favicon.ico" />
<link rel="icon" href="favicon.png" type="image/png" />
</head>
<body OnLoad="document.form1.uname.focus();">
<form name=form1 method="POST" action="./" enctype="multipart/form-data">

<input type=hidden name=redir value="090219_111057/Ba_source_GG_Feb09.pdf">
<table class="dlgframe" cellspacing=0 align=center><tr><td colspan=2 class="dlgtitle">Please login</td></tr>
<tr><td align=right class="dlgform">Username:</td>
<td align=left class="dlgform"><input type=text name=uname value=""></td></tr>
<tr><td align=right class="dlgform">Password:</td>
<td align=left class="dlgform"><input type=password name=upassword></td></tr>
<tr><td align=center colspan=2 class="dlgform"><input type=checkbox checked name=remember value=1>
Keep me logged in on this computer<br>
for the next 31 days or until I log out</td></tr>
<tr><td align=center colspan=2 class="dlgform">
<a href="?cmd=Forgot">Forgot password?</a></td></tr>
<tr><td align=center colspan=2 class="dlgform"><input type=submit value="Submit"></td></tr></table>
<center><a class="bottomlink" title="Goto ELOG home page" href="https://midas.psi.ch/elog/">ELOG V2.7.5-2172</a></center></form></body></html>

The file you downloaded is actually the login screen of elog! So probably your login token expired between the display of the web page showing the attachemnt link and the attachment download, or you turned cookies off. So when you try to download the attachment, your user credentials are not passed as cookies together with that request and elog barks at you requiring a new login.

Hi Stefan,

I added a new logbook for test and posted a message with three attachments: picture file, PDF file and excel file. Could you log in and look if I did something obviously stupid? The link is:

http://exo-elog.stanford.edu/Test+logbook/

User name: testUser
Password: go

I have this specific problem with the PDF attachments and I can not see any picture or the icons with Safari. Thanks a lot!

66226

Thu Feb 26 11:05:36 2009

mike cianci wrote:

Stefan,

I finally got it installed on a server at work (only took a year to work through all the red tape). I have seven logbooks up and running and only one is giving me trouble. It is an On-Line Help book where I wanted to store documents that could be referenced by our staff. It is the simplest of my logbooks (see config file below) but when I hit the "Submit" button it crashes the program. I can not see the error myself but the server guys are telling me that that we are getting an "Internal error, no valid header!" error. The only other thing that I can think to mention is that the entry that is crashing the program is a 60k Microsoft word table that I had cut and pasted into elog.

Ah, that rings a bell. We recently had problems with large tables. Can you try the current version if you get the same problem?

66225

Thu Feb 26 11:00:00 2009

> In the past I have requested the "mark whole thread" feature, not yet implimented.

That's not correct, it is implemented. Just add an attribute for that. Assume you have problem reports, so you 
add

Attributes = ..., Fixed
Options Fixed = boolean
Quick filter = Fixed

If you add a new entry, "Fixed" is false by default. All replies to that entry will contain then the same flag. 
Now if you want to mark the whole thread as fixed, do the following:

- go into list display
- display all entries in threaded mode
- click on "Select"
- select the thread you want to mark as fixed and click "Edit"
- now keep all attributes, but check the "Fixed" check box

and voila, the whole thread will contain "Fixed = 1". Using the quick filter, you can now show all fixed threads 
with one click.

66224

Thu Feb 26 10:01:37 2009

Re: Text Limit for Subject line

Robert Risher wrote:

Is there any way I can limit the ammount of characters in the Subject line?

Thank you,

Use the

Format Subject = ...

option as described in the manual. The last parameter is the "maximum number of characters allowed".

66223

Thu Feb 26 07:55:24 2009

Re: problem reading attached PDF files!

Stefan Ritt wrote:

Razvan Gornea wrote:

Stefan Ritt wrote:

Razvan Gornea wrote:

- Stefan

Hi,

OK but the box at login is checked to keep the login / password for 31 days and the cookies are enabled for sure. Now another user pointed out that it can not see pictures including the little icons when using Safari. I never used Safari but I got it just to see what is going on. So it took me some time but I think I have an idea now after comparing the source of a post that I read with Firefox to the one I get with Safari. Essentially the Firefox has the Javascript functions and class definitions before the HTML page starts. Very weird! Took me some time because when you view the source they both showed almost the same content (there are a few differences in <head>) ! But when I tried to save as HTML it showed this difference. Also I must mention that the problem for viewing the pdf attachments only happens with Firefox on Windows, I tried from a Linux PC and it works fine, now on Linux PC I have an older version of Firefox so maybe this has to do with Firefox version not OS. For this problem with the pictures and icons, if is not the Javascript related problem I am really totally last, how can one browser get the picture but not the other browser with the same content in the <body>!?!

66222

Wed Feb 25 22:01:32 2009