I have a suggestion for one or two improvements to XXE, having to do
with the svn/ WebDAV login.
We spent quite awhile on Friday trying to find out why three of us
couldn't get to the files on our https svn server through XMLmind, even
though when two of us tried, we could log in via an internet browser.
It turned out to be two different problems: the login data for one of us
had been entered wrong in the accounts database, while the other two had
entered our passwords wrong (and XXE was saving our wrong passwords).
Neither of these problems, of course, is XXE's fault. But what made it
more difficult than it should have been to trace down was a misleading
error msg: instead of saying we couldn't log in to the server, XXE
reported that the server was not a WebDAV server.
Specifically, if you enter the wrong login, XXE waits a long time--maybe
a minute--and then gives the following message:
Cannot connect to "https://svn...": "https://svn...";
does not support WebDAV.
(May be another location starting with ... supports
WebDAV.)
I tried logging in to the SVN server with the wrong ID or password using
Firefox, and it immediately comes back to the ID/password dialog. So
the server is sending back an appropriate error message, it's just that
XXE is apparently ignoring it. The requested improvement would be for
XXE to parse the error message, and warn the user if the login is refused.
On a related track, the URL chooser dialog might be improved, too. It
expects the "URL of an existing file", and if what you type in is not a
file, it allows you to click on "Browse remote files" or "Browse local
files" buttons. But the default action--when you hit <Enter> or click
on the "OK" button--is to try to open the URL *as a file*. I guess if
the URL I type in doesn't end in a slash, then this is at least a
reasonable thing to do (although I would think that XXE could
distinguish a directory from an XML file once it tried to open it, and
respond accordingly). But if my URL ends in a slash, then XXE just
beeps. Couldn't it instead automatically browse the local files (if the
URL begins with 'file://') or browse the remote files (if the URL begins
with 'https://' or 'http://', and maybe some other prefixes? In other
words, some smarts could be built into the default button. (But I've
never tried to program something like that, so maybe it's more difficult
than I realize.)
--
Mike Maxwell
"We signify something too narrow when we say:
Man is a grammatical animal. For although there
is no animal except man with a knowledge of grammar,
yet not every man has a knowledge of grammar."
--Martianus Capella, "The Seven Liberal Arts"
