[libreoffice-users] LO corruption
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 About a week ago, I asked this list for help and got what I needed to further investigate a situation I'm having with calc. I've now determined that my problems are due to corruption of the calc sheet. Further, I believe its calc itself that's doing it. Case in point. My buttons were shrinking randomly, but in a somewhat predictable fashion. Random as in I couldn't be certain when it would happen, but predictable in that when it happened it was done in a reasonably consistent way. Using code that Andrew supplied, I dumped the shapes on each involved sheet expecting 4 items. The first sheet had 1524 shapes of which 1520 had a control=null. The remaining 4 were my real buttons and were scattered among the debris. Common sense says I didn't manually create and somehow abandon 1520 shapes. I had absolutely no code that tried to create or manipulate the buttons, so Sherlock Holmes would deduce that OO / LO did it. I only used the IDE to create these 4 buttons on the first sheet and then copied them to 20 other sheets using cut and paste within the IDE. The remaining sheets all had far lesser amounts of rubbish, but not one sheet had only the 4 buttons it was intended to have. I wrote code to remove the dead ends. It worked like a charm. I saved and reacquired the spreadsheet and then all the buttons were gone on all 21 sheets. I repeated the process several times all resulting in the same outcome. I also wrote code to reinflate my shrunken buttons to their required size. Again, the code worked perfectly and I traversed each sheet to make certain all was well. After a save and restart of LO, I get a bogus password error part way through loading the spreadsheet and the whole thing won't load. The spreadsheet is not password protected, so where did a password come from? On a damaged but working spreadsheet (shrunken buttons), if I move a sheet from one position to another, or attempt to delete a sheet, all is well during that session, but a save and LO reload fails, again with some internal bogus password error half way through the loading process. When LO was OO, I tried repeatedly to have knowledgeable people look at this sheet as it has developed numerous anomalies over the 6 years I've been developing and using it. It is a laboratory full of LO issues that need to be addressed as to how these things could have happened, but I could never get anyone's attention. I'm a professional programmer (operating system internals) and can smell logic errors in the application. The main line works well, but I suspect that bugs exist in the more obscure portions of the code base. Lets face it, it takes computer power to create 1520 dead end objects and I didn't write any such code. Every few months I suck out my 9000 lines of macro code and redevelop the spreadsheet shell it fits within to get rid of the accumulated rubbish. There are almost no formulas anywhere, as I just use the sheet as a convenient GUI. My macros do all the work. Why did I write this email? It was therapeutic for me, and I hope someone in LO calc development will take me up on my offer to supply and help debug strange occurrences as they occur. Short of that, I'm going to have to rewrite this as a web app with a compiled back end. It's a Point of Sale system used in my wife's restaurant and she needs something more reliable than the LO version. - -- Bill Gradwohl Roatan, Honduras 504 9 899 2652 -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.11 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Fedora - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iEYEARECAAYFAk47TfAACgkQ7Orvev+eC8pm0QCePOi1W+ZdAK7S9OhcwVpKb2H8 qZIAoKfMAN7hJcKE5eOXXPAE5ZErf2LY =9UmO -END PGP SIGNATURE- -- For unsubscribe instructions e-mail to: users+h...@global.libreoffice.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/users/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
Re: [libreoffice-users] LO corruption
Bill, I apologise if I am about to tell you something you already know and have considered, but have you thought about code page errors? As I read your account I kept thinking how reminiscent it was of the problems I recently encountered where I had a particular spreadsheet that caused the GUI and many other things to go haywire (e.g. buttons and toolbars moving, column being rendered out-of-sync, ever growing lines, etc). In the end I tracked it down to the use of the degrees sign (Alt-248 from the keyboard or Alt+0176 from the character map on XP; It is flagged as U+00B0 'Degree Sign'), inserted into a spreadsheet by a Visual Foxpro Program using Code Page 1252, then rendered on a Linux box using LO. It did not matter how the symbol got into the file - imported, cut and past, CSV import - all hell broke loose. If you remove the 'degrees' sign from the original file everything just worked. Insert the symbol, the problem appears again. The aberrant characters appeared to be acting as a control character being randomly parsed by LO/OO causing all sorts of problems. This may not be the problem in your instance but as I said this kept going through my mind as I read your thread. Maybe it is something to consider - either the data or macros may have been created in an unusual codepage that is confusing LO. That is to say it is expecting X and being given Y, and baulking at the result. I solved my problem by stripping all seen and unseen characters from the data by filtering them through text editors then reinserted in a clean file. This is how I noticed the degree sign changing to another character. Cheers Simon Simon Cropper Website Administrator http://www.fossworkflowguides.com The fossWorkflow Guides (c) Simon Cropper CC-BY-SA 3.0 Australia http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/au/deed.en On 05/08/11 11:57, Bill Gradwohl wrote: -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 About a week ago, I asked this list for help and got what I needed to further investigate a situation I'm having with calc. I've now determined that my problems are due to corruption of the calc sheet. Further, I believe its calc itself that's doing it. Case in point. My buttons were shrinking randomly, but in a somewhat predictable fashion. Random as in I couldn't be certain when it would happen, but predictable in that when it happened it was done in a reasonably consistent way. Using code that Andrew supplied, I dumped the shapes on each involved sheet expecting 4 items. The first sheet had 1524 shapes of which 1520 had a control=null. The remaining 4 were my real buttons and were scattered among the debris. Common sense says I didn't manually create and somehow abandon 1520 shapes. I had absolutely no code that tried to create or manipulate the buttons, so Sherlock Holmes would deduce that OO / LO did it. I only used the IDE to create these 4 buttons on the first sheet and then copied them to 20 other sheets using cut and paste within the IDE. The remaining sheets all had far lesser amounts of rubbish, but not one sheet had only the 4 buttons it was intended to have. I wrote code to remove the dead ends. It worked like a charm. I saved and reacquired the spreadsheet and then all the buttons were gone on all 21 sheets. I repeated the process several times all resulting in the same outcome. I also wrote code to reinflate my shrunken buttons to their required size. Again, the code worked perfectly and I traversed each sheet to make certain all was well. After a save and restart of LO, I get a bogus password error part way through loading the spreadsheet and the whole thing won't load. The spreadsheet is not password protected, so where did a password come from? On a damaged but working spreadsheet (shrunken buttons), if I move a sheet from one position to another, or attempt to delete a sheet, all is well during that session, but a save and LO reload fails, again with some internal bogus password error half way through the loading process. When LO was OO, I tried repeatedly to have knowledgeable people look at this sheet as it has developed numerous anomalies over the 6 years I've been developing and using it. It is a laboratory full of LO issues that need to be addressed as to how these things could have happened, but I could never get anyone's attention. I'm a professional programmer (operating system internals) and can smell logic errors in the application. The main line works well, but I suspect that bugs exist in the more obscure portions of the code base. Lets face it, it takes computer power to create 1520 dead end objects and I didn't write any such code. Every few months I suck out my 9000 lines of macro code and redevelop the spreadsheet shell it fits within to get rid of the accumulated rubbish. There are almost no formulas anywhere, as I just use the sheet as a convenient GUI. My macros do all the work. Why did I write this email? It was
Re: [libreoffice-users] LO corruption
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On 08/04/2011 08:44 PM, Simon Cropper (The foss Workflow Guides) wrote: ... have you thought about code page errors? To answer your direct question - no I never considered code page errors. I'll check it out. Everything was developed on flavors of Fedora Linux starting on OpenOffice and now running on LO. I've blown this spreadsheet away numerous times over the years, keeping only my macros and a map of all the named cells I use as anchors. I wrote macros to reproduce the named ranges as I did that so often. I'd use one machine to bring up the old trashed spreadsheet and query it for cell widths, heights, colors, etc to reproduce the same sheet on another machine in a pristine environment. Add back my macros and go forward. That's a 2 day job of long tedious hours. Sometimes it would take months for something strange to start to happen, but it always does happen sooner or later. I'm not using any strange symbols. Its a simple POS system that accepts food orders, calculates costs, produces bills and receipts, does payroll, etc. Everything in it is mundane simple arithmetic and text. In the past, I hand massaged the xml files and pulled out huge sections of dead nested repetitive code. In one case I dropped the size of the .ods file by 110k worth of xml trash. I'm certain LO is not cleaning up after itself properly and leaving code droppings behind that cause this. I believe the IDE has some issues as it periodically does some strange things. On numerous occasions, I'd modify code in one module, switch to another module and make changes, save, reload and loose the first modules fixes. Infuriating! Am I supposed to remember to save for each module or should the IDE be smart enough to warn me I'm about to loose changes, or should it simply save everything when I say save? Something that trivial missing from the IDE says something. If you can insert a byte of data and cause LO to go berserk that only means it needs better insulation mechanisms to separate your data from its control codes. The developers should be thrilled to have you report finding a hole in their code so they can close it. If I as an end user can break it using only what was supplied to me to use, then the problem is in the LO product, and needs to be fixed. That's why I'm offering my help in supplying some pretty strange bugs and help in isolating and fixing them to the best of my ability. BTW - my internet connection is 16Kb/sec, when its up at all (Thank You TIGO/Honduras), so that is a tremendous limiting factor in what I can accomplish from here. - -- Bill Gradwohl Roatan, Honduras 504 9 899 2652 -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.11 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Fedora - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iEYEARECAAYFAk47ZWsACgkQ7Orvev+eC8p7bwCeOR89xquRJhIYi5NJmGMm8uyq APIAnRdNKkvvv7qDqRfXVf/XBpULdaom =9NNM -END PGP SIGNATURE- -- For unsubscribe instructions e-mail to: users+h...@global.libreoffice.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/users/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
