DB problem?

With this strange email problem I just experienced, it seems that the
“requestor” part of the ticket I was testing with got corrupted in some way.

For some reason, I could not add anyone as a requestor (still can’t …
at least, not to this ticket). I ended up having to force the entry
into the “Watchers” table within the DB, which wasn’t all that comforting…

Actually, the problem I am having is that I cannot any new watchers (of
any type) to any ticket… When I try, and hit “Save Changes”, it
updates the screen as it usually would, but doesn’t display the normal
“Results” table, and the settings for the queue watchers have not changed.

I’m running a very-standard 2.0.9 version of RT…

-Rich

Richard West $14.95 Registrations mailto:rwest@wesmo.com
Wesmo Computer Services .com .net .org .tv .cc http://www.wesmo.com
Full Domain & Web Hosting .BIZ .INFO & MORE!!

Two thoughts:
1) It could be ACLs
2) it could be mysql corruption

-jOn Thu, Dec 06, 2001 at 03:57:01PM -0500, Rich West wrote:

With this strange email problem I just experienced, it seems that the
“requestor” part of the ticket I was testing with got corrupted in some way.

For some reason, I could not add anyone as a requestor (still can’t …
at least, not to this ticket). I ended up having to force the entry
into the “Watchers” table within the DB, which wasn’t all that comforting…

Actually, the problem I am having is that I cannot any new watchers (of
any type) to any ticket… When I try, and hit “Save Changes”, it
updates the screen as it usually would, but doesn’t display the normal
“Results” table, and the settings for the queue watchers have not changed.

I’m running a very-standard 2.0.9 version of RT…

-Rich


Richard West $14.95 Registrations mailto:rwest@wesmo.com
Wesmo Computer Services .com .net .org .tv .cc http://www.wesmo.com
Full Domain & Web Hosting .BIZ .INFO & MORE!!


rt-users mailing list
rt-users@lists.fsck.com
http://lists.fsck.com/mailman/listinfo/rt-users

http://www.bestpractical.com/products/rt – Trouble Ticketing. Free.

No…no… don’t tell me that… pleeease.

Hrmm… ok… After a series of tests, I now know that:
o I cannot add Requestors or CC’s as “Current Watchers” to a ticket.
o I CAN add Administrative CC’s, but only a select set of addresses
(mine not being one of them).

This certainly isn’t making me feel good…

Is there an easy way to turn up the debugging somewhere? I am not
getting any errors from httpd…

Better yet, is there any way to recover from this without loss of
data? Is there a way to rebuild the database, and jam all of the ticket
contents back in without bringing over the corruption (if there is any)?

Hey… wait a sec… I just realized that I am seeing this same problem at
another client… Grrr… it cannot be two cases of corruption.

I’m running 2.0.9 pretty much right out of the box. No hacks or changes
or anything that I am aware of…

-Rich

Jesse Vincent wrote:

Two thoughts:

  1. It could be ACLs
  2. it could be mysql corruption

-j

With this strange email problem I just experienced, it seems that the
“requestor” part of the ticket I was testing with got corrupted in some way.

For some reason, I could not add anyone as a requestor (still can’t …
at least, not to this ticket). I ended up having to force the entry
into the “Watchers” table within the DB, which wasn’t all that comforting…

Actually, the problem I am having is that I cannot any new watchers (of
any type) to any ticket… When I try, and hit “Save Changes”, it
updates the screen as it usually would, but doesn’t display the normal
“Results” table, and the settings for the queue watchers have not changed.

I’m running a very-standard 2.0.9 version of RT…

Richard West $14.95 Registrations mailto:rwest@wesmo.com
Wesmo Computer Services .com .net .org .tv .cc http://www.wesmo.com
Full Domain & Web Hosting .BIZ .INFO & MORE!!

I am beginning to wonder… [:)]

Ok… I’ve stared at the privlidges a couple of times, and checked the
DB. Essentially, my account has every privlidge there is.

Is there another location I should be looking at?

This functionality did work previously, so I am not sure if it is due
to an upgrade or what… the last time it was used was under a 2.0.9pre
version from CVS…

It is behaving as if …

wait a sec… Damn, it is a good thing the first job I had back in H.S.
(in the 80s) was a beta tester… [:)] I just discovered the following:
o Under the “Add new watchers:” if I select “Requestor” and type in the
email address of “Rich.West@wesmo.com” and hit submit, the screen
refreshes after a moment and appears as if the update was denied.
o Under the “Find people whose…” selection, if I enter “rich.west” and
hit go, the page updates the “Add new watchers:” selections, listing
Rich.West@wesmo.com ()” as a username selection. If I select
“Requestor” next to my name, and hit submit, the ticket is updated
properly!

gasp So I can get it to work, but only in that round-about way and
only for known users (ones that RT has “discovered”)

Also, to add to the pool of (mis)information, if I manually enter
Rich.West@wesmo.com ()” . it does get added, but as "
Rich.West@wesmo.com ()". [:)]

This is weird…

-Rich

Jesse Vincent wrote:

Ok… This looks to have been tracked down to a browser usage problem.
And, as per Jesse’s request, I am sending in this summary to keep
everyone up to date.

It seems that Netscape 6 (Mozilla based) and other Mozilla based
browsers as well as IE 6 try to be a little smart in guessing the way
that the end user is working with forms. For example, if you are
entering information into a form and you fill out the fields, it guesses
that if you hit “Enter” or “Return”, you really mean that you want to
submit the form.

Netscape 4.x never behaved this way (not sure about IE). You physically
had to hit the “Submit” button with the mouse in order for the form to
be submitted.

Well, as it works out, if you want to “Modify people related to ticket
#blah”, and you want to add email addresses as “New Watchers”, you can
tickle a bug (possibly in form within RT, but I am not sure). If you
select a “Type” under add new watchers and then enter in an email
address followed by the “Enter” key, both Netscape 6 and IE 6 “submit”
the form.

Apparently, the way the form is getting submitted, some variable is
not getting set, so the resulting page displayed is the original
“Modify people” page as if you had not made any changes.

The proper way to make these changes is to not hit the enter key, but
move the mouse over to the “Save Changes” button and click on it.

I saw this problem on two separate RT installations (didn’t check beyond
that), one with RT 2.0.9 and the other with RT-2.0.10-test3. Both
behaved the same way… both under Netscape 6.x and IE 6. Both behaved
properly when the Save Changes button was manually clicked as opposed to
hitting the “Enter” key.

-Rich

Richard West $14.95 Registrations mailto:rwest@wesmo.com
Wesmo Computer Services .com .net .org .tv .cc http://www.wesmo.com
Full Domain & Web Hosting .BIZ .INFO & MORE!!

IIRC According to the W3C specs, ‘Enter’ is meant to submit a form alright, just not all browsers did so. Opera behaves this way also.
Tab is meant to be used to switch between fields.
The problem is, there’s two Submit buttons in the form, one is the ‘Go’ for
searching for users, and one for ‘Save Changes’.
When you hit Enter, it’s using the ‘Go’ submit, not the ‘Save Changes’ button.

This becomes a UI design issue, as opposed to a bug.

The form could be seperated into two forms, but that may upset some people who like to set/delete watchers, and search for more all at the same time.

The ‘Save Changes’ could (maybe) be made the default action, but that may upset some people too. I know you can set the TabIndex on form elements to decide what field to move to when ‘Tab’ is hit, there may be a similar thing to set default submit buttons.

As an aside, the same thing will happen if you are using the ‘search’.
If you hit enter, it’ll default to the Refine button, not the ‘Show results’ button. But that suits me perfectly, because I can build up complex queries quicker, without having to use the mouse, or tab all the way down.

-Feargal.On Fri, 21 Dec 2001 12:46:10 -0500 Rich West Rich.West@wesmo.com wrote:

Ok… This looks to have been tracked down to a browser usage problem.
And, as per Jesse’s request, I am sending in this summary to keep
everyone up to date.

It seems that Netscape 6 (Mozilla based) and other Mozilla based
browsers as well as IE 6 try to be a little smart in guessing the way
that the end user is working with forms. For example, if you are
entering information into a form and you fill out the fields, it guesses
that if you hit “Enter” or “Return”, you really mean that you want to
submit the form.

Netscape 4.x never behaved this way (not sure about IE). You physically
had to hit the “Submit” button with the mouse in order for the form to
be submitted.

Well, as it works out, if you want to “Modify people related to ticket
#blah”, and you want to add email addresses as “New Watchers”, you can
tickle a bug (possibly in form within RT, but I am not sure). If you
select a “Type” under add new watchers and then enter in an email
address followed by the “Enter” key, both Netscape 6 and IE 6 “submit”
the form.

Apparently, the way the form is getting submitted, some variable is
not getting set, so the resulting page displayed is the original
“Modify people” page as if you had not made any changes.

The proper way to make these changes is to not hit the enter key, but
move the mouse over to the “Save Changes” button and click on it.

I saw this problem on two separate RT installations (didn’t check beyond
that), one with RT 2.0.9 and the other with RT-2.0.10-test3. Both
behaved the same way… both under Netscape 6.x and IE 6. Both behaved
properly when the Save Changes button was manually clicked as opposed to
hitting the “Enter” key.

-Rich


Richard West $14.95 Registrations mailto:rwest@wesmo.com
Wesmo Computer Services .com .net .org .tv .cc http://www.wesmo.com
Full Domain & Web Hosting .BIZ .INFO & MORE!!


rt-users mailing list
rt-users@lists.fsck.com
http://lists.fsck.com/mailman/listinfo/rt-users

Feargal Reilly, | Communications House,
Systems Administrator. | 1a Lower Pembroke Street,
The CIA - http://www.thecia.ie/ | Dublin 2,
Ph: +353-1-6768230 Fax: +353-1-6767720 | Ireland.

PGP fingerprint: 9EA0 F62E 2345 6062 E522 00F2 31D0 B1B0 D678 96DB

This is really slightly off-topic, but…

Feargal Reilly wrote:

IIRC According to the W3C specs, ‘Enter’ is meant to submit a form
alright, just not all browsers did so. Opera behaves this way also.

And it is crucial that they do so!

Just think of all the JavaScript-“enabled” idiot web pages that don’t
have a proper submit button. I know the web designers think there’s a
reason for disallowing plain old submit, but as per usual, they’re wrong.

Atro Tossavainen (Mr.) / The Institute of Biotechnology at
Systems Analyst, Techno-Amish & / the University of Helsinki, Finland,
+358-9-19158939 UNIX Dinosaur / employs me, but my opinions are my own.
< URL : http : / / www . iki . fi / atro . tossavainen / >

File attachments NOT welcome unless agreed to beforehand.