Hi everyone,
we have formerly used the DOOCS eLogBook from DESY for a couple of years for some application at our large
research facilities. Now we have standardized on ELOG and I've got a request to import the old DOOCS eLogBook
data into the new logbooks.
I've looked into it and the import appears to be fairly straight forward. I have two questions to the community,
before I start to program an import script:

1) Has anyone created such an import function already, and if the answer is yes, can I have it?

2) Would anyone else be interested in such a "cross logbook import", and if yes, what are your requirements?

Thanks
Andreas

> [13 Nov]
> As my threads have lots of replies, I end up with a forest of ">" characters which makes it difficult to read
> earlier quoted entries (what with word-wrapping of the browser).
> I thought to replace the ">"s by a simple date entry prepended to the start of each reply. - much as I have 
> given at the top of this initial entry.
> 
> So this is what I put in the config file:
> 
> ....
> Time format = %a %d %b %y
> Date format = %d %b
> Prepend on reply = [$date] \n
> ...
> 
> The time is used in the string for the Thread display.
> 
> Only I don't get the date, with the date format, prepended to replies but the time, in the time format, as
> 
> [Wed 13 Nov 13]
> 
> Now this is hardly a disaster, but any ideas why the date formatting is being ignored?

Hi David,
yes, a $date is substituted with the "Time format" in the function build_subst_list().
I guess that is a bug, but it could break many existing logbooks to change it.
I leave this to Stefan.

There is a simple solution for your problem: you can execute a shell command.

Prepend on reply = $shell(date '+[%d %b]') \n
Reply string =

That snipped will do exactly what you want :-) (of course you need to have the "-x" option to start elogd.)

Kind Regards
Andreas

 I have a possible explanation for this problem, but it is just guess work. If I'm right, then just download the latest ELOG version and it will work properly again.

• You've downloaded an elog version from git, which still contained the line 12 in elogd.c: char svn_revision[] = "$Id$";
• Since you did checkout from git, the $Id$ was not substituted.  
• ELOG trys to extract the version by this:      rsprintf
            ("<center><a class=\"bottomlink\" title=\"%s\" href=\"https://midas.psi.ch/elog/\">ELOG V%s-%d</a></center>",
             loc("Goto ELOG home page"), VERSION, atoi(svn_revision + 13));
• svn_revision + 13 is pointing into the void. Still I would have expected that you get a number as a result.

My advice: download again and retry.
 

Okay, why don't you just remove the unwanted characters from the html file? Because the attached file contains exactly those characters.

> We recently installed ELOG and it works pretty well, but the load times are rather inconsistent. Most of the time 
> it is very fast, but it also often hangs for around 5-10 seconds while loading. It seems to affect all parts of 
> the page that are returned at random, so sometimes the main html file will hang, sometimes the css file and 
> sometimes the images.
> 
> The hardware it is running on is nothing special, an older 3 GHz Celeron, but it should be fast enough. It is 
> running on Debian 7. 
> 
> Any ideas what the problem could be, or how I could investigate it further to find the bottleneck?

I'm not an expert in debugging web applications. Here are my two cent:
We once had a problem when we hosted very large logbooks (several 10 thousands of entries) that the server would run
out of real memory and was slowed down by swapping. Therefore my first idea would be to monitor the server: Is
the CPU load peaking? What happens with the memory consumption? Any other suspicious process running on the server?
But it could be as well a network or browser problem. Did you try different browsers?
Did you check the elogd log file?