Re: [Eclass-users] Filenames and EClass

[Kevin O. <ke...@tu...>]

Dear Elke,

On Apr 23, 2004, at 12:09 PM, ed...@tu... wrote:

> Dear Kevin,
>
> Thanks a lot for your help. However, even if I shorten the names as you
> suggested I still experience the same problem. Do I have to do 
> anything else
> beside this like completely recreating the sections?

You can fix it without recreating the sections, but as you noted the 
problem is currently only occurring in one section (two sections, 
actually), so you probably want to just recreate those sections.

> In addition, it seems to me that there is just one section of the 
> Eclass that
> does not work ("Poverty Analysis") but many other section that have 
> even
> longer names do work without any problem.

The other sections that work were either created in a very new version 
of EClass where the user can choose the filename themselves, or more 
likely someone realized the long page name problem and worked around it 
by creating the pages with a short name first, and then later went back 
and re-named the pages with the longer names. Since the filename is not 
changed when you change the page name, this works.

You'll notice if you check the Page Properties dialogs for pages with 
long filenames that work correctly, most of them have filenames which 
differ from their page name or do not start with "Quantitative and 
Qualitative Analysis". Typically the file names are 20-30 characters in 
length.

> The section "Poverty Analysis"
> interacts in a strange way with the section "Evaluation of Public 
> Policy
> Programs". If I delete one, the other works alright.

If you check the HTML filename that is created (which by necessity is 
restricted to 31 characters in length), you'll find that because the 
EClass Page (.ecp) filenames are long the resulting HTML filename for 
both of those sections is "Quantitative_and_Qualitative.htm". Since 
both pages use the same filename, when you publish the page, they 
overwrite one another. Since EClass automatically generates those 
files, it cannot know if it is overwriting an old version of the right 
file, or overwriting another page. Therefore, you need to have some 
difference in filename within the first 28 characters of the page name 
to ensure that EClass does not overwrite the file.

Again, reducing the filename size to 31 characters would prevent this 
problem from occurring again, because it wouldn't let you create the 
page if another page with the same name existed.

Thanks,

Kevin

> Quoting Kevin Ollivier <ke...@tu...>:
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> Recently, Elke shipped me a CD-ROM with an EClass that had 
>> mysteriously
>> disappearing pages. Upon seeing the EClass, I realized the problem -
>> the filenames it was generating for the page, in conjuction with the
>> project name, were too long for Python to accept. Therefore, it would
>> not create the page on disk, although it probably would let you edit 
>> it
>> in EClass. (it  just wouldn't save your changes, unfortunately.)
>> Chances are, this bug is responsible for most of the "disappearing"
>> page problems people have been seeing.
>>
>> In Python, it appears there is a character limit that applies to 
>> *path*
>> names. Path names are entire paths, like:
>>
>> C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\My Documents\EClass
>> Projects\<Project Name>\Text\<Page Name>.html
>>
>> The problem occurs when both the project name and the page name are
>> very long, making the path name exceed 200 characters. In Elke's
>> project, both the course name and the page name were 60+ characters in
>> length, meaning that the entire title went over 200 characters.
>>
>> One solution to this problem is to document that one should avoid long
>> page names, which I think we should do regardless. Not just for
>> technical reasons, but because it makes the table of contents very 
>> hard
>> to use, particularly because (in this case) the page names all started
>> with the same phrase "Combining Quantitative and Qualitative 
>> Analysis".
>> This resulted in a number of pages showing up in the contents page as
>> "Combining Quan..." and the user had to expand the contents to fill a
>> majority of the screen just to see what the page names were. If that
>> phrase must appear in the page titles, an acronym such as "Combining
>> Q&QA" should be chosen to improve readability and make the contents
>> page easier to browse and use.
>>
>> However, we should also consider technical solutions, and I wanted to
>> let people know how I see things working in the future. First, I will
>> use short path names (DOS names) on Windows internally, such as
>> "C:\Docume~1\<username>\MyDocu~1\EClass~1\MyEClas~1\Text\" when
>> creating and editing files, which will reduce the characters quite a
>> bit and should not affect usage in any way. In addition, I will
>> restrict project filenames to 31 characters, just as EClass already
>> does with published files. Now that EClass lets you specify your own
>> filenames, I can do this without putting any restriction on actual 
>> page
>> names. Hopefully these changes, plus the added documentation, will
>> resolve these issues in the future.
>>
>> Also, BJ recently brought up a related issue:
>>
>>> I am not sure this is a bug or was done intentionally. The project
>>> name does not necessarily have to be the same as the Course name. For
>>> example, you can change the project name and the course name is
>>> unaffected. Intentional? Not that big a deal, I just thought it was
>>> odd.
>>
>> How things are done is that the "Project Name" in the Open Project
>> dialog is actually the folder name in the EClass Projects folder. They
>> get out of sync when one changes the "Course Name" in EClass, because 
>> I
>> do not automatically rename the folder as well. There are a few
>> approaches to fixing this issue, and I was wondering what people
>> thought about them:
>>
>> 1) Rename the folder. This has the disadvantage that EClass will need
>> to reload the course to ensure proper operation, and this is the main
>> reason I avoided doing this in the past.
>>
>> 2) Create a "course" database. This would have the benefit that when
>> you click on "Browse" and load a course it can be added to the
>> "database" and thus you only need to click browse once, and from then
>> on you can load it through the open dialog. The downside is that
>> copying and pasting a course into your EClass Projects folder will no
>> longer add the course to the "Open Project" dialog any longer. You 
>> will
>> need to manually Browse for it and load it.
>>
>> 3) Load the Course name into the open project dialog. I've avoided
>> doing this because it's a lot of work for the computer. Every time you
>> load your project, it needs to go through all the courses in the 
>> EClass
>> Projects folder, load the course, and then find the Course Name. We
>> could do this, still, but it would probably increase load times.
>>
>> 4) Leave things as they are. ;-)
>>
>> Please let me know what you all think about these changes!
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> Kevin
>>
>>
>>
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