> > It seems that maximal number of attachments is about 20. When you try to add
> > more, a new entry _is_ added to the logbook but the refernce to it is not
> > added to the web page.
> 
> Uhhh, Mr. "monster of number of attachments" gave it's stroke!

:)  I wanted to post a message with ~200 attachments.

>Well, we never 
> had such large number of attachments so I forgot to put a waring in. The 
> limit comes from 
> 
> #define MAX_ATTACHMENTS  20
> 
> in elogd.c which you can easily increase (as long as you have RAM!) and 
> recompile.

Actually my report was NOT about this limitation. You have it - it is fine.
The problem is that I add some 'zombies' or dead files to my logbook.

BTW is there a tool to check the 'integrity' of a logbook? That all
attachments are in place,  there are no dead files, etc. I perfectly
understand that it is not _highly_ desired or needed, but with the two last
problems (auto-removing of attached files and silent adding a new ones with
20+ attachments) I have doubts that our logbook in a good state. And we just
started to use it. And I am still so excited about it!!

> `elconv' is just a simple tool to convert pre 2.0 log files to the current
> format. (Well, after all these confusions, dropping it from the future
> releases won't be surprising -at least for me- ;) You might try some
> well-known text-processing tools ie. preferably awk or perl to make the
> required conversions. But I think using comma or tab as the delimiter is 
not
> suitable due to the content of logs. If all you want is importing them to
> excel/word, you should play with the delimiter options of mentioned 
programs
> before trying a solution.

Hi Recai. I have several requests of this kind. "Want to import/export to 
comma separated text" or "XML". So one option is to extend elconv to handle 
all kind of conversions 1.x -> 2.x, 2.x -> CSV, 2.x -> XML. An alternative 
would be to write some awk/perl scripts as you noted. The disadvantage of 
this solution would be that they rely on the installation of awk/perl which 
is not given on windows systems. But nevertheless, if anyone volunteers to 
write a conversion tool, I would be happy to include it in the distribution. 
If not, I can put it into elconv.c, but that could take until June, given my 
current work load.

> We use ELOG 2.3.5 for Windows with a German language file and have found 
> some new problems:
>
> . Certain strings are not translated.

That has been fixed in meantime.

> . If a user uses the new "password forgotten" function, he receives an 
> email, but after having clicked the URL in the mail, he gets the following 
> error message as simple text, i.e. not formatted by use of the CSS file:
> 
> Invalid URL: Notizen/?redir=%3Fcmd%3DChange%20password%26old_pwd%
> 3DE3ARcjI/&uname=sal&upassword=E3ARcjI/ 

Have you tried the elogd.cfg setting:

[global]
URL = http://your.host/

it might help there.

> . If one could not log in through the button "Login", one does not receive 
> an error message, but will be pushed simply back to the main page, 
> status "Not logged in". (This was as far as we know was also with earlier 
> versions of ELOG.)

You should at least receive a login page. So does this push back occur on a 
wrong username there or how does it happen?

> . If you want to change as an admin the passwords of several users, it 
> would be convenient, to get always back to the page, where you may choose 
> the next user ... but you will be pushed back to the main page with the 
> messages. (This was as far as we know was also with earlier versions of 
> ELOG.)

Agree. Will work on that.

> . But the simple change of passwords for users does not always succeed: I 
> have changed the password for a user A to "anuvis", the next user B should 
> have gotten the same new password, but this time it was not accepted. 
> Message "Wrong password". Might it be, that this goes only once because of 
> an initialisation problem ? I had to edit the password file manually.

Can you reproduce the problem? If so, tell me the exact sequence of thing 
you do and I can try to reproduce it as well, then fix it.

> . Opera browser 7.03 simply crashes, when choosing the direct URL to our 
> logbook, i.e. http://localhost:8080/logbook2. We have set a general 
> password file and a different read password for each of our logbooks.
> If we choose http://localhost:8080/logbook1 everything is fine. We get a 
> window "Authentication required" and type in simply the read password, no 
> user name.

Wow, your browser crashes? Funny, I never had that. So what does the browser 
say?

> If we choose http://localhost:8080/logbook2 the behaviour is different. We 
> see the window "Authentication required" appear, then Opera crashes.
> Change of the read passwords did not change this erroneous behaviour. This 
> problem was not with version ELOG 2.3.4.

I will try to install 7.03 and reproduce this, might take some while...

> . NOWRAP tag in Date column
> The date column takes quite a lot of space in the logs overview. As the 
> information is only of secondary importance I would prefer date and time 
> being wrapped like e.g. the contributors name. Of course, I could help 
> myself with a 
 in my language file, but this would force a break also 
on 
> the single message view.

Something like

Date format = %B %d, %Y

in your configuration file reduces the date string length considerably.

> Actually my report was NOT about this limitation. You have it - it is fine.
> The problem is that I add some 'zombies' or dead files to my logbook.
> 
> BTW is there a tool to check the 'integrity' of a logbook? That all
> attachments are in place,  there are no dead files, etc. I perfectly
> understand that it is not _highly_ desired or needed, but with the two last
> problems (auto-removing of attached files and silent adding a new ones with
> 20+ attachments) I have doubts that our logbook in a good state. And we 
just
> started to use it. And I am still so excited about it!!

Actually my philosophy is not to cure symptoms of a problem, but fix the 
source of it. The reply/attachment bug is fixed, and a warning about 
exceeding the number of attachments will come soon.

About the integrity, there is no problem. As you might know, the xxxxxxa.log 
files are plain text files. The line "Attachments: xxx" contains a simple 
text list of all attachments. In the above case a few files might be missing 
in that line, but they are present in the log directory. So in worst case 
edit the xxxxxxa.log file manually, adding the file names, and maybe restart 
elogd to rebuild the index properly. Otherwise there is no integrity problem.

I've been using elog for several months now, and one thing that's always
seemed odd to me are the things like max number of attachments and max
attachment size are defined right in the source code, and not in the config
file.  It would seem that it would be simple to be able to define stuff like
that in the config file (and have defaults in case they weren't specified),
which would fix a lot of the recompiling problems - just edit the config file
and restart elog.  Not that recompiling elog is difficult, it just seems like
recompiling for such a simple setting is overkill...

Anyway, just curious.  Is there a technical reason this is not done?

Justin

> source of it. The reply/attachment bug is fixed, and a warning about 
> exceeding the number of attachments will come soon.

> I've been using elog for several months now, and one thing that's always
> seemed odd to me are the things like max number of attachments and max
> attachment size are defined right in the source code, and not in the config
> file.  It would seem that it would be simple to be able to define stuff like
> that in the config file (and have defaults in case they weren't specified),
> which would fix a lot of the recompiling problems - just edit the config 
file
> and restart elog.  Not that recompiling elog is difficult, it just seems 
like
> recompiling for such a simple setting is overkill...
> 
> Anyway, just curious.  Is there a technical reason this is not done?

The max attachment size I was able to not only make configurable, but to make 
dynamically. So if there is a very large attachment, the size is dynamically 
extended as long as there is RAM. The max number of attachments is not easy 
to change, since it's used internally as an array size, which has to be 
determined at compile time. Making this dynamically would require a major 
rework, which of course could be done, but it might be that there are more 
urgent requests.

> We would like to give access to selected users to only their Group. So that 
> for instance Users1 cannot access the books of group Users3. I was 
> wondering if there is any notion of "User profile" or security per logbook 
> Group implemented?

No, groups of users are not yet implemented, but it's on the wishlist and I 
added your vote for this item.

> What we do for now is that we have 3 different PASSELOG files and for each 
> Book we need to specify which PASSELOG should be used for authentication. 
> This works fine except that we prefer that users do not see the other 
> logbooks listed in the main menu nor the other "inaccessible" logbook tabs 
> in the logbook view. Is there a way to hide these for them (but only for 
> them)?

A (poor man's) work-around right now is to run three instances of elogd on 
three different ports, then use Apache as a proxy. I do this in this server 
for example. Under http://midas.psi.ch/elogdemo you see the public logbooks, 
while under http://midas.psi.ch/megelog you see some logbooks from an 
experiment here at our institute. The access control is completely separated, 
and you don't see the logbook tabs from the other group as well.

> We are using elog as a small database system, today we came across a 
> problem where 2 people were editing the same record and the first one to 
> submit his changes were overwritten when the second person submitted his.
> 
> Is there anyway to lock a logbook record when someone has pressed EDIT, 
> maybe set a flag in the logbook entry so it has to be unlocked when its 
> submitted by the originator or by an administrator.

No, but I will put it on the wishlist. Anyhow it is hard to implement 
something like this. Assume that I would lock a page whenever it's edited 
by 
someone. This person can edit it and forget to submit the changes, just 
close 
the browser. Since the elogd server does not know when a remote browser is 
closed, it cannot determine if the editing is just taking long or if the 
person closed the browser. In the latter case, the message would be locked 
forever and nobody could change it any more. If I put a timeout, like keep 
locked for N minutes, it's again not 100% safe. I saw people doing shift 
work 
with elog, opening a page, keeping it open for 8 hours and then submit it. 
So 
if I set the timeout to 8h, and someone abandons editing a message, this 
message would be blocked for 8h, which is probably also not what you want. 

Alternatively, I just can display a messge: Warning: this message is 
currently edited by user xxx on host xxx. But if the warning is ignored by 
the user, then again we have the same problem.

Do you see a clever solution to that?