Forum OpenACS Development: Strange behavior with AOLserver on Ubuntu 14.04

Hey,

I observed a strange behaviour when using AOLserver on Ubuntu 14.04. When opening a form for editing, if the text field has an empty value (so $element(value) == ""), the browser would show the ? in a rhombus which usually signifies an unknown character in the character set.

I first assumed this has something to do with PostgreSQL, but as it happens even if PG isn't involved, I ruled it out. Then I tried the various other manually compiled culprits (XoTCL, LibThread etc.), really trying to find a needle in a haystack.

Ultimately I patched OpenACS acs-templating, which cured my problem and seems to have no ill side effects in the few pages of ]project-open[ I tested, but maybe someone else has observed this behaviour at one point?

Installation instructions I followed: http://erp4projects.de/install-project-open-on-ubuntu-14-4-lts/

EDIT: DO NOT USE THE BELOW CODE!  DO NOT USE THE BELOW CODE! DO NOT USE THE BELOW CODE!

Patch:

commit 688b5adf4f31cfd9b7606ce5819be7041d814669
Author: Malte Sussdorff
Date:  Sat Feb 7 10:19:20 2015 +0100

    Remove the value field if the value is actually empty

diff --git a/tcl/widget-procs.tcl b/tcl/widget-procs.tcl
index 38848ad..e155d83 100644
--- a/tcl/widget-procs.tcl
+++ b/tcl/widget-procs.tcl
@@ -389,7 +389,7 @@ ad_proc -public template::widget::input {
    # Handle display mode of visible normal form elements, i.e. not hidden, not submit, not button, not clear
    if { $element(mode) ne "edit" && [lsearch -exact { hidden submit button clear checkbox radio } $type] == -1 } {
        set output ""
-        if { [info exists element(value)] } {
+        if { [exists_and_not_null element(value)] } {
            append output [ad_quotehtml $element(value)]
            append output "<input type=\"hidden\" name=\"$element(name)\" value=\"[ad_quotehtml $element(value)]\">"
        }
@@ -400,7 +400,7 @@ ad_proc -public template::widget::input {
            append output " disabled"
                }

-        if { [info exists element(value)] } {
+        if { [exists_and_not_null element(value)]} {
            append output " value=\"[template::util::quote_html $element(value)]\""
        }

Dear Gustaf,

thanks for pointing this out. I take a few lessons from it:

1. Well documented does not mean it shows up in Google search results (at least Link 2 did not and the top search result now is this thread 😊.
2. Gone are the good old days when we could install OpenACS or ]project-open[ without compiling the web server manually (as the packages won't work) on current versions of (at least) Ubuntu.
3. We need an installation instruction for ]project-open[ on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS which is more detailed than the current one for 12.04 LTS. And make sure it is linked and can be found using google search 😊.
4. ]project-open[ should eventually move to OpenACS 5.8, Naviserver and PG 8.3 in order to benefit from the larger OpenACS community (otherwise I would not have posted outdated acs-templating code). Maybe it happens before PG 10 / OpenACS 6.x is out.

Best wishes
Malte

regarding 2: Yeah, but I'm not sure what exactly is the fix, as I had to use the HEAD version of AOLserver, nssha1, nspostgres and nscache to get it working. Not what i would recommend to the Debian maintainer.
regarding 3: Yes... I was actually using this one as a reference point for my installation instructions at http://erp4projects.de/install-project-open-on-ubuntu-14-4-lts/. Maybe Frank can look into making a more generic version available.
regarding 4: I assume those patches run on top of OpenACS 5.8 and work with Naviserver? Then it would be great to get them, as haven't seen them incorporated into ]project-open[ yet (https://github.com/project-open/intranet-hr/commits/master).