As far as I know, it is not possible, if you make a "new" entry.
You could configure the elog, to always PRESET an atribute, but then it is always the same, not the last.

I think the "duplicate" entry function could provide you partly with the functionality you want, as it copies all old values into a new entry.

Regards,
Sebastian

Here are the relevant excepts from the documentation:

Subst <attribute> = <string>
When submitting logbook entries, attribute values can be substituted by some text. This text can contain arbitrary fixed text and following values:

• $<attribute>: The entered value of the attribute itself
• $host: The host name where elogd is running
• $remote_host: The host name of the host from with the entry was submitted
• $short_name: The login name (if password file is present)
• $long_name: The full name from the password file for the current user
• $user_email: The email address from the password file for the current user
• $logbook: The name of the current logbook
• $date: The current date, formatted via "Date format"
• $utcdate: The current UTC date (GMT) and time, formatted via "Date format"
• $version: The version of the ELOG server in the form x.y.z
• $revision: The Subversion reversion of the ELOG server as an integer number
• $shell(<command>): <command> gets passed to the operating system shell and the result is taken for substitution.

Execute new | edit | delete = <command>
It is possible to execute a shell command on the server side after a new message has been submitted, edited or deleted. This feature has been used in the past for SMS notifications over a telephone system and for synchrnonization of the ELOG database with an external SQL database. The <command> can contain substitutions similar to the Subst command. In addition the list of all attachments can be referred to via $<attachments>. The text body of the entry can be referred to with $text. It should be noted that only the first 1500 characters of the text can be used, in order not to exceed the limits of the shell. Following (Unix) command writes a notification into some file:

Execute new = echo "New message wiht ID $message id of type $type from $long_name on $remote_host" >> /tmp/elog.log

It should be noted that this feature can impose a security problem. If someone can edit the elogd.cfg through the Config command of elogd, that person can put malicious code into elogd.cfg and execute it. This is even more severe if elogd runs with root privileges. To avoid such problems, the execute facility is disabled in elogd by default and has to be enabled explicitly with the "-x" command line flag. The administrator has to ensure then of course that only trusted people can edit elogd.cfg.

Have fun!

Andreas

Dear all,

First, many thanks for creating and sharing this great tool which is ELOG! Our users are very happy with it!

I have few questions about inserting images into the entries.

From time to time our users insert them directly in the editor what leads to encoding the whole image in the HTML log file and the images does not appear in the attachments list. Saving and further editing of such entries slows down the whole ELOG server which uses 100% of CPU.

I'm not sure how they do it Ctrl+C & Ctrl+V, drag & drop, etc.. What I know is that if they add it using the "Insert image" action in the editor there are no problems and the images are properly listed in the attachments.

I read in the docs:

uploading or downloading an attachement file is a single request, and causes the entire file to be loaded in server memory while the request is being processed.
This is not normally a problem for the sort of short, text-mode entries ELOG is designed to support. However, if a user starts to upload or download a large attachment file (or image) over a slow link, all other users on that ELOG server will have to wait for that transfert to finish before they can access any logbook on that server. This is why there is a low limit on the size of attachments, and why ELOG should not be used to distribute large files under intensive multi-user conditions.

but I think this is not our case. Here I talk about wrongly inserting a single image of 700KiB.

So, I'm asking:

1. Is the behavior that we observe something already detected? If yes, which are exactly the wrong ways of inserting the images?
2. Is it fixed in newer ELOG versions?
3. Is it possible to disable the wrong ways of inserting the images in order to avoid such problems?

Many thanks in advance for your help!

I found the most limiting factor of ELOG to be the file access. ELOG stores all entries in files and therefore has a lot of disk access.

We found that an AFS directory for ELOG is unusable. We tried to store our logbooks on NFS, and it was barely usable but slow. Now we use a local disk on the server, that works fine.

If you want to speed up ELOG the best approach is a dedicated server with a local SSD storage.

Hi All,

Can I view who is connected to ELOG (I'm the Admin) ?

thank you.

Sorry for the late reply. I didn't get email notification about an answer to my question :)

Actually, I just wrote <hostname> and so on for privacy. In my attempt, they have real values. 

And yet, I got as result: "Message successfully transmitted, ID=-1".

Follow up question: do I really need to install everything even though I only want the client? Or is there somewhere a package just with the client code?

Thanks

Jose

Yes, you can see that in the logging file, if you turn on logging. You might want to read the manual https://elog.psi.ch/elog/config.html. Here's the relevant excerpt:

• Logfile = <file>
  This option specifies a filename which logs all login/logout activities and successful user connections for logbooks with user level access. The the logging level (see below) is larger than 1, also read and write accesses can be logged.
• Logging level = 1 | 2 | 3
  Specifies the logging level. The higher this value, the more information is logged. Default is 2:
  • 1: Log only logins and logouts
  • 2: Log also write accesses
  • 3: Log also read accesses

Thank you, I found it.