Forum OpenACS Q&A: ACS 3.5 beta released

This new version does require the use of some upgrade scripts, and as far as I know they have not been tested really thoroughly (but "should work"). However, there are some nice improvements in here, and this is the first time in over a year there's been a repository for ACS 3.4.x code.

Malte, THANK YOU for setting all this up!

I'm really looking forward to getting some feedback on the Intranet code. There are some more improvements I should upload eventually...

Hi Malte,

This is great!  We have a heavy custom site running on 3.4.10 are there any security fixes or essential fixes that we may get from 3.5?  I am sure we will not upgrade our site because of the added features but we would like to get the security fixes.

Hi everyone,
congratulations on this achievement! It looks wonderful and I particularly like the new Intranet. We still regularly use the ACS 3.X code here in Quest and would eventually hope to contribute some code back to this effort. We're also hoping to move to OpenACS 4 as soon as we can take a decent look at it.
well done,
Brian
PS One issue I did find was that I wasn't able to create a ticket. http://acs35.theservice.de/ticket/issue-new-2 crashed with the following error:

no such key: verify
    while executing
"nsv_get ad_page_contract_filters $filter"
    (procedure "ad_page_contract_filter_parameterized_p" line 2)
    invoked from within
"ad_page_contract_filter_parameterized_p $flag"
    (procedure "ad_page_contract" line 111)
    invoked from within
"ad_page_contract {
    Process information for new ticket.

    @param project_id new project for the ticket
    @param domain_id new domain for the t..."
    (file "/web/acs35/www/ticket/issue-new-2.tcl" line 3)
    invoked from within
"source [ad_conn file]"
    (procedure "rp_handle_tcl_request" line 2)
    invoked from within
"rp_handle_tcl_request"
    invoked from within
"catch $handler error"
    invoked from within
"rp_abstract_url_server"

This is just great Malte!!! :)

Thanks for your effort and brilliance.
some questions:
What means QAS and bulk file upload?

P.S. I created a bboard at the community and is not fully working...

Note that I think you may need to get an account on http://acs35.theservice.de before you can get to the SDM. After you sign up for an account, I believe you'll be able to get to the SDM. Otherwise, a blank page is returned.

I tried getting to the demo server a few times the last several days but my account hasn't been approved yet.

The ACES 3.5 source code (I don't think it's accurate to call it ACS 3.5) looks appealing, but I can't get the thing to boot. What obvious things am I missing? I've put my aolserver and acs .ini files at http://people.brandeis.edu/~rcgraves/i-must-be-stupid/

I am running AOLserver/3.3.1+ad13, apparently same as you, Oracle 8.1.6 (1 rev down, yes I know about the hole, we're firewalled).

I am obviously talking to the database correctly because APM is bootstrapping and I get things in sec_sessions in the right tablespace.

Do I need some i18n patches not in the standard 3.3.1+ad13? Did I need to do anything special for internationalization when creating the Oracle database?

I tried both following the posted directions and skipping the load-education.sql step since [most of] it seems already installed by modified version of load-data-model.

I get "file not found" on http://samantha.unet.brandeis.edu:8080/register/

As a troubleshooting stup I created a http://samantha.unet.brandeis.edu:8080/foo.html which according to the log is found, but it's returning zero bytes.

129.64.99.158 - - [02/Feb/2002:00:33:40 -0500] "GET /foo.html HTTP/1.0" 200 0 "" "Lynx/2.8.4dev.7 libwww-FM/2.14"
129.64.99.158 - - [02/Feb/2002:00:34:45 -0500] "GET / HTTP/1.0" 302 336 "" "Lynx/2.8.4dev.7 libwww-FM/2.14"
129.64.99.158 - - [02/Feb/2002:00:34:46 -0500] "GET / HTTP/1.0" 302 345 "" "Lynx/2.8.4dev.7 libwww-FM/2.14"
129.64.99.158 - - [02/Feb/2002:00:34:50 -0500] "GET /register/ HTTP/1.0" 404 532 "" "Lynx/2.8.4dev.7 libwww-FM/2.14"

Errors loading the data model:

Warning: Trigger created with compilation errors.

Errors for TRIGGER DROP_BBOARD_SUBSCRIPTION_TR:

LINE/COL ERROR
-------- -----------------------------------------------------------------
4/3      PL/SQL: SQL Statement ignored
4/24     PLS-00201: identifier 'GC_BBOARD_TOPICS' must be declared
8/5      PL/SQL: SQL Statement ignored
8/17     PLS-00201: identifier 'GC_TOPIC_USER_MAP' must be declared
SQL> /packages/education/02-education-api.sql
SQL>
Function created.

...

SQL> /packages/education/20-education-calendar-setup.sql
SQL>
Warning: Trigger created with compilation errors.

Errors for TRIGGER EDU_CAL_CAT_UPON_NEW_CLASS:

LINE/COL ERROR
-------- -----------------------------------------------------------------
3/6      PL/SQL: SQL Statement ignored
3/18     PLS-00201: identifier 'CAL_ITEM_TYPES' must be declared
7/6      PL/SQL: SQL Statement ignored
7/18     PLS-00201: identifier 'CAL_ITEM_TYPES' must be declared
11/2     PL/SQL: SQL Statement ignored
11/14    PLS-00201: identifier 'CAL_ITEM_TYPES' must be declared
14/2     PL/SQL: SQL Statement ignored
14/14    PLS-00201: identifier 'CAL_ITEM_TYPES' must be declared
18/2     PL/SQL: SQL Statement ignored
18/14    PLS-00201: identifier 'CAL_ITEM_TYPES' must be declared

Warning: Trigger created with compilation errors.

[every subsequent calendar and portal function gives an error]

Thanks, but I'm still not there yet.    I found two issues:    The service-name.tcl link on your ACES install doc is broken (can someone post both their ad.ini and aolserver .ini or .tcl?), so I copied one from an existing ACES snapshot installation. Since that old ACES was based on 3.4.7 or so, it did not have nssha1.so or nscache.so configured. So I added them, and now the sec tokens get generated. However, I still can't download a file. samantha:8080/ redirects to samantha:8080/register/ as expected, but that gives a 404. The /foo.html file still shows a 200 result but zero bytes get sent.    I found one other thing I should have realized/mentioned in the first place. Not only are we 8.1.6 but it's 8.1.6SE, so we can't use functional or bitmap indices. The only error I see is the upper(email) index in core (which is safely ignored), but the same thing might be why the calendar and portals data models aren't working. I'll track that next. I know it is possible to run those data models on 8.1.6SE because we're doing it on http://my.brandeis.edu (CVSweb linked from the home page).    The complaint about ad_footer is because the education module isn't loaded (the proc is commented out of acs-core and redefined in education -- anyone wanting to run ACS 3.5 without education module will have to address that).    Bottom line: I think it's an Oracle Standard Edition problem, I'll take it from here. There's also a chance I broke some i18n stuff when I compiled nsd long ago, I'll try recompiling it if I don't find the answer in bitmap/functional index issues.

DOH!  <p>  There is no problem with the data models. I simply never loaded them.  <p>  If load-packages.sql is mentioned in the install guide, I missed  it. The sequence you have to follow is:  <ol>  <li>cd www/install; ./load-geo-tables  <li>cd ../doc/sql; sqlplus < load-data-model.sql  <li>./load-sitewide-search  <li>sqlplus < load-packages.sql  <li>Start aolserver, then kill it (maybe necessary to bootstrap apm before the next step)  <li>sqlplus < load-education.sql (maybe optional if you uncomment ad_footer and maybe a few other things in acs-core, but we happen to want the education module)  </ol>  Anyway, now that I have it booted, it looks great!!

Jade,
I checked again and that's still happening. Click on New Ticket, type Test into both Subject and Message, leave everything else as is, then click Create. I'm logged in as myself.

Brian

Yes, Jade, I get the same problem. no such key: verify. Same
behavior on acs35.theservice.de and my local installation.

Viewing the HTML source of issue-new, I see no hidden .sign field
for new_msg_id despite the call to export_form_vars -sign new_msg_id.

Did a pre-3.4.10 version of export_form_vars creep into the CVS tree
somehow?

Most of the /packages/acs-core/utilties-procs.tcl in acs3.5 beta is actually older than ACS 3.4.10. No form that uses the very important (for cross-site-scripting security) ad_sign API will work. The /ticket/ problem is just the beginning. Dropping ad_sign support would be a step backwards.

The only thing added to utilties-procs.tcl in the 3.5 beta dist that wasn't in 3.4.9 is "set to list" by wtem@olywa.net. Since I'm not sure how or where that code is used, I think I'll have to leave the merge to them.

Where is the procedure show_folders supposed to be defined? file-storage requires it but doesn't define it.

Is it just me, or is static HTML serving broken? http://samantha.unet.brandeis.edu:8080/foo.html should be a full page but actually only returns the </body> close tag. Without a </body> close tag, I get a zero-byte response.

I'm curious how many people are using ACS 3.5. I've stolen some code from it myself, but I haven't fully moved over to it. I am, however, uploading my code changes, and I think I'll do another round of uploads in the next week or so.

After using OpenACS at home, I really wish their was an upgrade path...

Question: if a package was written for ACS 3.5, how hard would it be to port that package to OpenACS 4.5beta? I know this is a "it depends question". If it's a pretty self-contained package, is this fairly easy to do?

I think I figured out why I wasn't able to get ACS 3.5 working. I
was using Aolserver 3.4, and ACS 3.5 works with 3.3 + ad13,
correct?

I have a few changes I am thinking about uploading to the
repository, but of course it is a little difficult for me to test them
out on a clean version of ACS 3.5, unless I reverted to Aolserver
3.3 + ad13.

Additions:

calendar: allows you to select whose entries you see on the
shared calendar. also changed the private calendars so they
were optional. added in a new view which puts the employee on
the left side of the calendar, and the date on the top. Added ticket
deadlines to all views of the calendar. These are all for the
calendar module. I'm eventually going to retire my own ticket-
calendar page, but not until I've replaced it thoroughly in the
calendar module.  These changes do require new tables, which
I provide in an upgrade script.

tickets: added an option to "see tickets I assigned" to the index
page. Improvements to the view of the ticket cross references,
and to the ticket views in general. A lot of minor interface tweaks.

A lot more that I'll see when I diff the code.

I am curious how many people are using the ACS 3.5 repository.
Am I wasting my time uploading these changes? Has anybody
else uploaded any of their improvements and/or bug fixes?

Will get the site up again within the next 48 hours. Sorry for the inconvenience, but the clients sites have been more pressing. Will upload acs35 as well to the repository in due time.