Dear all,

there seems to be still lots of confusion with the new "draft modus" introduced in elog 3.1.2. Here is how it works:

If you edit an old or new entry, your changes are written to the elog server every few seconds. The entry in the elog database is marked as "draft". The idea behind that is that if your browser crashes or you navigate away from the elog page without saving your entry, the "draft" entry is sill in the elog database and can be recovered later. This is typically useful on some shift logbooks, where people keep the entry open for many hours and add things every few minutes. If they have a crash, they would loose a few hours of information.

The draft modus now has a few drawbacks:

• If you have some draft entries in your elog database, you don't see them until you hit "New" the next time. Then the system offers you to continue the open draft entries.
• Once you change an existing entry, you cannot go back to the version of that entry before you started to make modifications. The only option is to keep the current version or delete the whole entry. The old version of your entry in the database is overwritten every few seconds with the current contents of your edit text field.

To fix the first problem, I introduced a new flag "List drafts = 0|1". If this flag is 1, the draft entries are shown in the list view. The default value for this flag is 1, so normally you should see the draft entries in the database. You should refrain from editing these entries if you know that currently somebody else is working on them, otherwise you will overwrite each other's modifications. The modification is in the current git version of elog which is 3.1.2-6ec506b.

The scond drawback is harder to address. In order to go back to previous version, you would need a full version system (ala git), which is far beyond the scope of elog. I'm working on a partial fix by storing the contents on an entry inside the browser when you start editing an entry. You can then "cancel" your modifications by pasting back the original version from your browser. This works of course only if your browser does not crash or you do not navigate away from the elog page, in which case the original version will be lost.

If anybody has a strong opinion about these changes, please post them here.

Stefan

In version 3.1.2-416db9f I implemented a "Restore" button, which should fix the second drawback. If you press it, you should be able to go back to where you started when editing an entry.

Most mail delivery systems have a maximum size for attachments. In the past, if an elog attachment was larger than this size, the email server refused to accept this email and no notification is sent. Now one can specify the maximum allowed email attachment size with

Max email attachment size = <n>

where <n> is the number of bytes. If an email attachment is larger than <n>, the attachment is not sent with the email notification, but rather replaced by a link to the elog server for that attachment. By clicking on the link in the email notification, a browser will then open and download the large attachment. For each each elog installation, the admin has to figure out what the maximum attachment size of their SMTP server is, and then put this number into the elogd.cfg setting  above. For most installations, the default of 10 MB will just work fine.

Stefan

A new version 3.1.2 of elog has been released today and can be retrieved through the normal download section. Since it fixes some vulnerabilities, it is recommended to update to this version.

Stefan

Hello,

I've been successfully using elog as a daemon since several years on a Linux machine. For some reasons recently I had to switch to a Windows 7 machine. Here, setting up the elog daemon doesn't work for me:

(a) running the command:

"...\ELOG\elog.exe" -c "...\ELOG\elogd.cfg"

in a windows shell works perfectly fine - logbook is up and running as set up in the cfg-file.

(b) However, starting the windows service manually (start->control panel->system and security->administrative tools->services) that was set up automatically during installation of elog leads to an error message:

"Error 1053: The service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion"

From the service settings I can verify that the service is running exactly the same command that works in (a).

Could someone please share the windows service settings? Thanks in advance.

Cheers, Christian

These problems are usaully related to user rights. Try starting the service under a different (maybe admin) user.

Stefan

Hi Stefan,

you were right - running the service by an authorized user solved the problem.

Thanks a lot.

Cheers, Christian

hi

I have an elogsystem for documenting emergency services. I have a starttime and an endtime. Is it possible to calculate the diff between the 2 timestamps and convert it to minutes?

Attributes = Bereitschafts Kalender Woche, Bereitschafts Woche, Einsatzbeginn, Einsatzende, Einsatzzeit, Telefon Nummer, Station, Status, Problem 
Options Status= Offen{1}, Erledigt{2}, Geschlossen{3}

......

Type Einsatzbeginn = datetime
Type Einsatzende = datetime

....

Subst Einsatzzeit  = $shell(Einsatzende - Einsatzbeginn) 

regards

/alex