Forum OpenACS Development: Strange character issue on old OACS Site

1: Strange character issue on old OACS Site

Posted by Jon Griffin on 10/09/18 08:59 PM

I believe this is OACS 5.3.

This is an old instance and the original server died a few weeks ago. I was the original author so they called me to fix it. Well, it's difficult since many of the packages like Postgres 8.4 don't exist anymore, but I got things back to working except one weird issue.

On add/edit, any blank text fields show up with a � as the start char.

I also checked the source and it looks like it's returning a space as seen here:

input type="text" name="best_contact_time" v alue=" " id="best_contact_time" size="10" >

On debug I get: input type="text" name="affix" v alue="�" id="affix" size="20" style="background-image: ...">

Any ideas? I thought maybe it was some kind of encoding issue, but it seems to be sending in UTF-8. Also, it only affects text inputs (single line) any other blank inputs show fine.

This was an exact dump of the other database and OACS code that had been working for 15 years.

I'm stumped, but then again I really haven't worked on OACS in many years.

2: Re: Strange character issue on old OACS Site (response to 1)

Posted by Gustaf Neumann on 10/10/18 08:04 AM

In case you are using AOLserver, make sure to upgrade to 4.5.2. Sounds like [1].

[1] https://openacs.org/forums/message-view?message_id=4229777

3: Re: Strange character issue on old OACS Site (response to 2)

Posted by Jon Griffin on 10/10/18 04:19 PM

Yes, I'm using the latest Debian which I believe is 4.5.1.

I will try that and hope it works. Is Naviserver the better recommendation now?

Thanks

4: Re: Strange character issue on old OACS Site (response to 2)

Posted by Jon Griffin on 10/10/18 04:28 PM

Any ideas where 4.5.2 lives now? I can only find 4.5.1 on github

5: Re: Strange character issue on old OACS Site (response to 4)

Posted by Jon Griffin on 10/10/18 05:27 PM

Never mind, I found it, but can't compile for some reason. Keeps saying ./util/nsmakeall.tcl: Permission denied

Even though I'm root.

6: Re: Strange character issue on old OACS Site (response to 5)

Posted by Gustaf Neumann on 10/11/18 11:03 AM

If the plan is to make as little as possible changes on an ancient version of OpenACS, one should fix AOLserver. I think one should be able to compile it with moderate tweaks. Maybe, one has to replace ./util/nsmakeall.tcl by tclsh ./util/nsmakeall.tcl.

if the plan is to upgrade the instance to some future-safe version (recent versions of Tcl, PostgreSQL, security fixes, etc.), It is recommended to use NaviServer instead of AOLserver. One can get a recent version of OpenACS with NaviServer with [1] compiled on many Unix versions. This install-script gives you at least proper binaries and a config file for OpenACS with NaviServer that can be usually quickly adjusted to local needs.

all the best
-g
[1] https.//openacs.org/xowiki/naviserver-openacs

7: Re: Strange character issue on old OACS Site (response to 1)

Posted by Patrick Giagnocavo on 10/11/18 04:44 PM

From memory, this is a character set issue. The Postgres encoding for the database must be UTF8 and there is a setting to put in the NaviServer code also.

See this old thread, with the ns/parameters settings: https://openacs.org/forums/message-view?message_id=31940

8: Re: Strange character issue on old OACS Site (response to 1)

Posted by Andrew Piskorski on 10/12/18 03:53 PM

Jon, FYI, I am currently still running a (customized) ancient version of OpenACS 5.2.3, on a fairly recent NaviServer. I needed to hack some things in that old OpenACS code make it work with the newer NaviServer, but it wasn't that hard. At least it was much easier than I expect a full upgrade all the way to OpenACS 5.9.1 to be.

9: Re: Strange character issue on old OACS Site (response to 8)

Posted by Jon Griffin on 10/12/18 06:39 PM

Thanks Andrew, for now it's stable, I'm just worried about going forward. I have a dev box copy I may mess with to see if I can make it work and hopefully document it.