Send/Receive from Internet not comprehensive?

Question

So there has been a nagging problem with S/R for quite some time with the Chadian Arabic project. It is a large project, with a lot of history, so maybe that plays some part. But for at least a couple of years (i.e. with PT7 as well) there have been complaints that when an expat (non-Administrator) member of the project is overseas and tries to receive certain permissions or configurations from the Admin in Chad, they just don’t come through. Then when the expat arrives back in country, they do S/R with a USB key, and the permissions come over just fine.

I thought that maybe that problem would be a thing of the past with PT8, but when I made this script change to the projects (PT8 project using an Arabic script RTL font for a Roman script project), we had it again. I was in one office, made the changes to the project, confirmed the problem was fixed, did S/R to the Internet, then asked the team in another office to do S/R to the Internet as well. They did, but it didn’t fix the problem.

I have a project member’s laptop in my office this afternoon, and saw the same thing. The project was correct on my computer (with language code shu-Latn), I did S/R to the Internet, to make sure everything was there. From the team laptop, I did S/R to the Internet, and noted the problem was still there. Here are the details of what I saw in PT8:

• I opened Project Properties, and Language (in the background) still says (shu)
• A progress indicator shows that it is Getting available registrations…
• After a while (made the connection to Internet?) Language (in background) changes to (shu-Latn)
• Then it gives the message dialog: “only project administrators may edit members”
• Then it gives this error dialog: “Failed to update user roles on the Paratext Registry for project CABRS // Go to Project > Users, Roles and Permissions and verify that users and roles are correct.”
• I click OK, it changes the Language back to (shu), and tries to get available registrations again
• It sits in this loop until I Cancel out the overall Project Properties dialog
• If I go into Project Properties again, it still says (shu)

I imagine if this team member was an Admin, it would have succeeded in fixing things up, like it did on my computer. But here’s the strange thing which brings us back on topic: if I S/R from my computer to a USB key, and then S/R with that key on the team computer, it fixes things up just fine, and the Language shows up as (shu-Latn) in the Project Properties.

So I come to the conclusion that S/R to the Internet is NOT the same as S/R to the USB key, and in some ways the S/R to the key is “better”.

So I had fixed up the RS project, and I thought I would just confirm my observations on Paratext’s failings unequivocally by demonstrating the same behavior with the AS project, where we were attempting to change the Language to shu-Arab. I did S/R from my computer to the Internet, then S/R to the project computer and… it changed the Language to shu-Arab! Rats! Well, maybe there is something different about that project that made it work… So I can’t prove this problem “unequivocally”, but I do have some proof that not all Send/Receives are equal. It might be helpful if someone who knew about differences in S/R of these kinds of parameters could enlighten us. And it would be really helpful if a team member overseas could be assured of being able to get all of the permissions and settings made by the Admin of their project who is still in country.

Answer 1

We’re having some more problems with S/R on this project. Last night at home, with no Internet connection, the S/R with a USB key between two computers was usually succeeding but then causing PT8 to crash/infinite loop. The S/R progress bar would make it to the end, and it would work on pulling up the Changes Sent and Received window, sometimes briefly showing the Loading versions… progress bar, but then that bar would go away and it would just show a blank Changes window. It would sit there for a while, then sometimes it would briefly switch over to the S/R window, then back to the Changes window. And it would never make progress. You couldn’t click anything in Paratext except the X close icon on the Changes window, and if you clicked that it would say that Paratext was not responding and you could shut it down. If you re-open Paratext, it comes up fine, and if you try to do a S/R again, it comes back immediately with the Changes window and shows that there are no changes, i.e. it doesn’t loop or crash because there are no changes, so obviously the first S/R actually finished, but then got hung up on the Changes window.

I have never seen this problem when the computer is connected to the Internet. I thought I would try to replicate this problem in the office, so I made a minor properties change on one computer, did S/R to a USB key, then tried to do S/R on the second computer that was in airplane mode, i.e. not connected to the network. Alas, it worked fine. I thought I would try to be helpful and send in a problem report from that computer anyway. So I turned off airplane mode, wrote it all up from within Paratext, poured out my heart, then clicked on send, but the submission failed (with our bad Internet connection, I suppose), and I lost all of what I wrote up! That isn’t very helpful. Doesn’t PT8 save what is written up in a problem report somewhere, so that it can be reloaded if the submission fails? I didn’t have the courage to try to submit a problem report again, and decided to just reply here.

Comments

In PT8, if it fails to send the problem report, it should have brought up a message like:

Paratext could not send in the problem report. Would you like Paratext to retry later?

If you choose to not retry later, it creates a PT8 Problem Report{number}.p8pr file on your desktop that you can e-mail to [Email Removed].

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OK, and if you say you would like Paratext to retry later, does it actually do that? I.e. the data that you entered, is it stored away for Paratext to try to report the problem again later when it has a more stable connection tot he Internet?

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Yes, it should attempt to send them every time Paratext starts up (it does it invisibly). If you want to verify your problem report is in the queue, you can look in the C:\Users\{UserName}\AppData\Local\Paratext80\QueuedProblemReports folder.

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That’s helpful to have that path for future reference, and to know that Paratext attempts to do what it said it would do… Thanks.

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anon291708:

Yes, it should attempt to send them every time Paratext starts up (it does it invisibly).

Does it keep trying forever, or is it set to have a max number of tries?

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wdavidhj:

Does it keep trying forever, or is it set to have a max number of tries?

It will try forever (every time Paratext restarts).

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That doesn’t seem a good choice: if the user has very poor Internet, it may never succeed, but the user will never know whether it’s been sent or not!

Answer 2

Please use Help > Report a problem to report this issue.

Answer 3

But now I have done the S/R from the USB key and there isn’t this Language problem any more. The loop thing described in the bulleted list above while trying to load the Project Properties was something I could have reported before I did the S/R from the USB key, but it’s too late for that now, since the problem is gone. But in this post I wasn’t trying to “fix” that Language issue or how it was handled.

The point I was trying to make in this post is that the S/R over the Internet sometimes is not sufficient for passing all project properties and permissions to another team computer. That is a serious defect IMHO because remote members of the team can’t always get everything that they need from S/R over the Internet. Maybe it helps those remote members if they are Admin on the project (like it seems to be for the current issue described), but remote members who are not Admins should still be able to receive everything that they would be able to receive from a USB key. But from what I’ve seen, that is not the case.

So let’s set aside the Language configuration issue and focus on the fact that S/R from the Internet and S/R from a USB key do not accomplish the same thing. Can someone explain how those can be different?

Comments

I got the CABRS and ShuAS projects from the Paratext 8 send/receive server
and the settings for both projects are correct there. I thought the
language may have a default script that was causing problems, but that is
not the case.

So, I’m guessing it’s something about how we are updating the local values.
I don’t know of any difference between how this works for S/R to the
internet vs S/R to a USB drive. S/R to the Internet does contact the
registry server, but that is for license information and not the full
project data.

If you have tortoisehg and can put in on a machine with the problem, maybe
looking at the history of the Settings.xml file would give a clue to what
is going on.

Let me know if you want to set up a remote support session - we can do this
with Bomgar.

John+Wickberg

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jeffh:

But in this post I wasn’t trying to “fix” that Language issue or how it was handled.
…
So let’s set aside the Language configuration issue and focus on the fact that S/R from the Internet and S/R from a USB key do not accomplish the same thing. Can someone explain how those can be different?

The S/R types should not result in different behaviors - it is most likely a bug. The reason for using Help > Report a problem was to hopefully get information in the log file (which is automatically sent in problem reports) that might have been helpful when trying to track down the problem. However, since more time has passed, it’s probably not worth it anymore since the log file gets truncated as Paratext gets used. Now, it’s probably best to work with @John+Wickberg to try figure out what went wrong.

Answer 4

Might this be related to the fact that the Administrator permissions in the Paratext 8 registry (which are accessed when doing s/r online) were, at the time of migration, not the same as the Administrator permissions in the Paratext 7 project (which are the only ones accessed when doing s/r by USB)?

Comments

I don’t believe so, since we have also seen this behavior before with PT7. Something like this: Admin changes something in the project in Chad (I think permissions of some kind were the usual culprit), S/R over the Internet doesn’t pass those permissions to someone out-of-country, person arrives back in country, does S/R with USB key, receives permissions.