Re: Problems retrieving and inserting references

Hi,

Quoting "O. Hartmann" <[email protected]>:

> The server (refdbd) is running on a FreeBSD 8.0-CURRENT/AMD64 SMP box,
> another test facility is located on an older FreeBSD 7.2-STABLE/i386 box.

My laptop runs 7.2-STABLE as well. This should make it fairly easy to  
compare setups.

> I can add references from a file very easily as far as no UTF-8 or ISO
> specific encodings (Umlaute) are used.

This is unusual and probably a configuration problem. Before going  
into the details, I'd ask you to provide the following information:

- the versions of RefDB, libdbi, libdbi-drivers, and of your database engine
- the contents of your configuration files. Running "refdb-bug"  
retrieves your config files and a few other things. Please post the  
file created by this tool.
- what kind of reference data are you using? The /examples  
subdirectory of the source distribution contains some test data that  
should just work. If you're experiencing the problems with some kind  
of non-standard data (e.g. exported from other software), feel free to  
zip or tar.gz some examples and send them to me off-list.

> When using then a client, refdbc, I'm able to retrieve via 'getau' all
> auhors, but trying 'getref' results in a got-stuck process which I can
> only leave by hitting Ctrl-C.

That is, the client gets stuck? Or the server child process? If the  
client appears to be stuck, most likely the server child process has  
run into trouble. In that case, please set the debug level of refdbd  
to "7", truncate the server log (usually /var/log/refdbd.log), and  
restart the server. Repeat the queries which fail and post the log.

>
> I also installed the web based contributed interface, but with this, on
> no server I'm able to insert references or retrieve references. The only
> way to retrieve anything is searching by 'Search indices', 'authors'.
> There I can retrieve author names.
>

I don't recommend to fiddle with the web interface at this moment. The  
web interface calls the C clients, so if these don't work ok in the  
first place, the web interface won't either.

> I digged the database server and there the tables (most recent
> PostgreSQL), the references are accurate stored.
>
> Even with the supervisor/administration account for PostgreSQL I'm
> incapable of retrieving references.

Did you check the PostgreSQL error logs for anything unusual? I don't  
expect any permission problems though, as you seem to be able to  
create and fill the tables.

> Another problem concerns trouble when inserting references taken from
> our 'JabRef' output or BibTeX in gemeral. I use bib2ris-utf creating RIS
> files for insertion into RefDB, but something gets confused. In most
> cases, the end tag 'ER  - ' is corrupted that way that the trailing
> space gets lost.
> Another issue targets LaTeX/TeX tags, like {\'C}uk. As often special
> tags occur at the beginning of a line, say the first author's name, the
> whole entry gets corrupted, the end of line gets lost and the next line
> seems to merge with the first, faulty one.
>

This is probably due to limitations of the RefDB tools in question. It  
would be helpful if you could send me a couple of JabRef/BibTeX  
datasets, along with the datasets after running them through  
bib2ris-utf8, and with some comments on how the converted datasets  
should look like (I'm no BibTeX expert, so some conversion problems  
might not be obvious to me).

regards,
Markus

-- 
Markus Hoenicka
[email protected]
(Spam-protected email: replace the quadrupeds with "mhoenicka")
http://www.mhoenicka.de



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