> however, I am not sure what elog checks for when doing the post through
> form. and the auto-submit script always failed and returns "200 EOF". i can
> get to the login part and grab form entry. its only the submittion failed.

What you can do is run the elog submit utility with the "-v" flag (verbose) and
grap the output. It's HTML code, but you should see any error message there.

I happened to find something interesting when trying my perl script. it hangs the
elog system with hand-crafted http header.

I also sent email with more detail on this. just want to make sure you are aware of
this.

Qiang

> > however, I am not sure what elog checks for when doing the post through
> > form. and the auto-submit script always failed and returns "200 EOF". i can
> > get to the login part and grab form entry. its only the submittion failed.
> 
> What you can do is run the elog submit utility with the "-v" flag (verbose) and
> grap the output. It's HTML code, but you should see any error message there.

> I happened to find something interesting when trying my perl script. it hangs the
> elog system with hand-crafted http header.

This bug has been fixed in revision 1.524 of elogd.c available from CVS.

Dear Ken,

first of all thanks for trying to improve the documentation. For me as the developer it's always hard to imagine what people need to know, since I know already all about elog. Therefore I ask usually other people to write the documentation. The one for elog was written by Fred Pacquier.

When going through your comments, I realize that you had some problems on your first steps. But you say you have a Windows installation. If you use the normal installer, you get some entries in your "Start" menu under Windows, with which you can directly access your "demo" logbook which comes with the installation: Start -> All Programs -> ELOG -> Demo Logbook (requires running server). To create a logbook, just access your demo logbook, then clock on "Config", then you see a button "Create new logbook". Your point 1) mentioned above is actually not necessary if you use the default root directory. It might confuse people more than it helps. Point 2) is true, but only some internal database behavior, which might not be interesting to most users.

1a. If you go to the "Find" form, you can add filters on several attribute. The URL of the result page can be bookmarked: this is your filter.

1b. If you define quick filters on FROM and TO, then you can enter filters on both.

2. If you start elogd with the -x option, then you can execute scripts in the "subst" and "subst on edit" commands. Within those shell scripts you can use $START TIME and $STOP TIME to calculate the attributes value. Look for the "Subst" command in the documentation.

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

Sorry, I didn't yet have time to implement your request.

Have you considered to download an entry in plain text? Like this entry you can load with

https://midas.psi.ch/elogs/Forum/66555?cmd=Download

which should be much easier to interprete. If you write your entries in ELCode or plain format, it should be even easier.