[Refdb-users] refdb & '&'

[Markus H. <mar...@mh...>]

Matt Price writes:
 > Hey Markus:
 > 
 > a couple notes:
 > 
 > I may have overstated my problems with refdb earlier.  I think my
 > 'addnote' issues don't actually require rebuilding the database, but
 > rather, just restarting refdbd.  obviously that's way less drastic.
 > 

I could track down the problem with the help of your logs. I can't
explain why in your case restarting refdbd got you around the problem
(it can't, if I understand my code correctly :-). In any case, no one
wouldn't want to restart an app anyway. I think I've fixed the
problem. In brief, adding a dataset or a note involves creating a
temporary citation key if the dataset doesn't specify one. If there is
a problem with a dataset and it is not removed properly from the
database again, this citation key may block the next addnote/addref
command as it has to be unique. That is, this problem occurred only
with a database engine that does not use transactions, only with
datasets that cause a parse error (see below), and only with datasets
that don't specify a citation key. I've fixed the code that removes
partial datasets if you can't do a rollback, and I've also fixed a bug
that swallowed the error message of the XML parser. It now returns for
your dataset:

refdbc: addnote ../pseudotest/data/xnoteset.xml
server error: Parse error at line 50:
not well-formed (invalid token)

Now it should be pretty clear what's going on.

 > As for the note, the stumbling block seems to be the presence of the
 > character '&'.  Do you know why this would be?  being quite ignorant
 > of almost all the technologies involved here, I'm not sure what the
 > issue is.  
 > 

Yep. The ampersand is one of the reserved characters in XML (others
would be < and >). In order to use a literal ampersand in an XML
document, use the entity "&amp;" instead. Same with "&lt;" and "&gt;"
for < and >, respectively.

Thanks again for helping me spot this bug.

regards,
Markus

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