Files disappearing and corrupting while working on project.

[Hansolo]

I am getting very frustrated with A5V9. Since I upgraded from V8 it has been nothing but trouble of the type that used to plague V7 when it first came out.

First I have a report I work tirelessly on for hours saving often and then boom the report disappears from Control Panel. Not a trace!

Same thing with a Letter. Format it for hours and almost have it the way I want it and then BOOM. Gone without a trace. Luckily I learned to backup the project this time but still lost a significant amount of work.

Tonight I was working on a5w pages in my project again saving, publishing to local and testing often (because I need too) and then BOOM. a5w page corrupt, missing lots of code and components. Spent another hour rebuilding and then BAM the other a5w page I was working on corrupted. Luckily I backed that one up before it corrupted.

Just a few minutes ago the grid component I was using in the above mentioned a5w page disappeared from the web projects control panel!

I can't work like this! I am wasting hours upon hours and getting now where fast. I am sure this is not what everyone else is experiencing or Alpha would be out of business.

This is happening on two machines one is and XP installation of A5V9 and the other a Vista installation of A5V9. Two different projects in the case of the Report and the Letter problems. Using build 2095_3264 (seems to be the latest)

Probably dumb question since I see no other complaints on V9 about this but her goes, anyone else have these problems and a solution?

[Steve Wood]

Re: Files disappearing and corrupting while working on project.

I'd suggest it is your particular environment or application. I pound on it 10 hours a day without problem. You do have to watch the last two HTML tags on your page. If you see them drift farther down, your page is going to blow up. This used to happen a lot but seems to be remedied.

[Hansolo]

Re: Files disappearing and corrupting while working on project.

Thanks Steve, I certainly respect your opinion about anything Alpha5 and the fact you and others have no apparent problems is telling but in this case it is a sham to blame the environment. I don�t run anything exotic or unusual by developer standards, don�t have unusual hardware and am experiencing this on two entirely different systems with two different licensed installs of Alpha5V9, one a laptop running XP pro and one a desktop running Vista Ult.

I develop in the Visual Studio IDE and have never had an issue with project files or individual files corrupting or disappearing. Same with Delphi, Dreamweaver, Shockwave, FrontPage and the list goes on.

I am a big multitasker and tend to have several useful productivity programs running at the same time. In this respect the environment may be an issue but in today�s computing environment this should not be an issue. Who uses just one program? Heck what are the 4-cores and tons of memory for?

More likely Alpha5 is having trouble with the management of the embedded file formats it uses. In the case of web components and a5w page corruption I suspect it is catching writes improperly for whatever reason. Multithreaded execution seems to be lacking or purposefully avoided in Alpha5. My issues mostly occur with a save followed by close and open again process or less often in publish and execute.

I don�t think Alpha5 was necessarily intended to be used on a clean installation of the OS and no other software for productivity and development running although any programmer can dream that that would be the environment for their software. But running Alpha without anything else open (no multitasking) tends to reduce the errors as it did in V7. Problem is that that is not the way I work and not an efficient use of the environment.

I�ll keep plugging away though because it is obviously something I need to learn not to do when using A5V9 and I can�t see trying to change an environment where everything else is working fine.

By the way, have had A5V8 on the same XP systems and never had these issues with the environment. Still running V8 on the XP system because I have been cautious to migrate all projects to V9 and don�t have these problems. Still does not mean it is not V9 vs. the environment but it does mean V9 is acting flaky in the environment compared to the previous version.

At least these are my observations so far.

[Pat Bremkamp]

Re: Files disappearing and corrupting while working on project.

Chuck,

Most of us have learned the hard way to avoid the WYSIWYG screen. If that screen dowsn't like your code, it will delete it. In fact, I think Alpha will be getting away from that screen in V10.

So, I don't know if that is your issue, but take it as a suggestion anyway.

Pat

[Steve Wood]

Re: Files disappearing and corrupting while working on project.

Yeah, but it's impossible to figure out without being at the problem computer.

I find that Firefox recently consumes lots of CPU, probably some of the add ins.

An Alpha application WILL be problematic under some conditions. That's why I mentioned the creeping last two HTML tags. Check that. If you find some have dozens or even hundreds of blank lines before those last two tags, open each A5W page in Notepad, remove the blanks and save.

Re multitasking, here is my currently open apps: three copies of A5V9, Illustrator and Photoshop, Word 2007 to my help guide, a couple notepad windows with scrap code, Outlook, two RDP sessions to servers, both Firefox and IE, Alpha Help doc, MySQL is running in the background. And it's only 7AM.

[NicholasWieland]

Re: Files disappearing and corrupting while working on project.

I develop in the Visual Studio IDE and have never had an issue with project files or individual files corrupting or disappearing. Same with Delphi, Dreamweaver, Shockwave, FrontPage and the list goes on.

At least these are my observations so far.

Hansolo,

Being someone who works with Microsoft you should know about memory leaks. I find that MS Products always have memory leaks and that the longer you leave them running they get bigger. I have found that Alpha too leaks and you need to sometimes work save get out and back in. And your environment has a lot to do with everything that is running...... If you have ever had a machine run out of ram and or HD space you know it acts wacked out. Memory leaks cause very strange problems.

Steve's PC is fine, Mine acts a little finicky and I have to work save get out and come back in sometimes. ( I have a lot of "other" software installed).

And not to be picky I would not ever try to use Vista, I am to old and there are only 24 hours in a day.

Unless you are 100% sure that one of your installed programs did not install a file/dll that is conflicting with something else then it is something on the machine.

Nicholas Wieland

[Hansolo]

Re: Files disappearing and corrupting while working on project.

Don't get me wrong, programs crash and memory leaks galore. I have my share of that in windows. Word and Excel crash from time to time but now they almost always (99%) recover the file you were working on and almost 100% intact. Visual Studio has its share of IDE quarks but never ever does it change a module or windows form or any of the objects from something that works when last edited to something that partly resembles what was working and scrambles half the code. A Crystal Report is never created and in the project and then totally gone, forever without my deleting it.

This is strange behavior isolated to Alpha5 and the way it handles files in the environment it is given.

So I will be Steve like on the Vista issue. I have used Vista Ult the last two years and have to say I have no major problems whatever. It is head over heels more productive than XP for me, stays on 24/7 (try that with XP) but it is different and you have to put in the time to learn the differences. Just like A5V9 I suspect. :-)

Thanks for the replies guys.

[MikeC]

Re: Files disappearing and corrupting while working on project.

Chuck,

stays on 24/7 (try that with XP)

I am curious about this. What service pack? I have one computer that has a ton of software installed and is very unstable with XP SP2. My main work computer, also with XP SP2 has just the "bare bones" amount of software (only about 30 or so loaded and used) and is so stable that it usually is 3-4 weeks between reboots and then it is only done just because I haven't in a while!

If you were running XP with SP3, it gives me even more trepidation in updating my current PCs to that service pack (not broke so generally don't fix).

[peteconway]

Re: Files disappearing and corrupting while working on project.

"You do have to watch the last two HTML tags on your page. If you see them drift farther down, your page is going to blow up. This used to happen a lot but seems to be remedied. - Steve."

It's not you! -we all have become over-tolerant, it�s been a long time since the last patch and the board is full of relative issues on strange editor behaviour.

Steve, you are expert on A5, your issues are limited as you know what not to do. I must tell you I am really hoping V10 delivers stability and reliably above all, even above Ajax. Tools, Options and functionality need to work 100% of the time without question and provide reliable and specific error information should something be NQR (Not Quite Right) as a user /developer error. An example of this is Dialogs, what a great option, but error reporting is almost nonexistent.

So � for now keep your backups, and do your work around apps but we all need to know when to call it a day.

I had it explained to me once that people become tolerant; people learn to live with faults. To test this, I asked a guy one day in the factory � �How reliable is the machine you are using� � �it�s great� he said, �so any issues not really.. What do you mean not really?� � well he said, �every day I normally have to hit it with the hammer 5 times to keep it going every day � but lately I need to hit it more often, but eventually it gets going again, so it�s good.

Keep your backups safe.

[NoeticCC]

Re: Files disappearing and corrupting while working on project.

Chuck,

Most of us have learned the hard way to avoid the WYSIWYG screen. If that screen dowsn't like your code, it will delete it. In fact, I think Alpha will be getting away from that screen in V10.

So, I don't know if that is your issue, but take it as a suggestion anyway.

Pat

I very much agree there, the WYSIWYG screen has a tendency to "munch" code, so whatever you do it is always advisable to copy the whole code (the HTML not WYSIWYG) into a text file before you start messing in the WYSIWYG screen.

While other products like FrontPage (which offer little in the way of coding and database features!) can manage better WYSIWYG screens, they, as is the problem with WYSIWYG, produce tons of un-needed code and introduce a lot of stray tags, which in the long run causes more hassle than the brief period of adaptation involved in learning to edit in the HTML editor more than anything else.

Although I know some things, like adding components, can't be done any other way, it is actually very educational to get to grips with the HTML side rather than edit in WYSIWYG all the time - certainly our former web master has started editing the text of our HTML pages in the HTML view after a short while, since it is easy to do and gives you FAR more control!

Having said that, I am a very visual person so the grid and dialog builders have been a godsend for me.

As v10 will be the first version released with codeless AJAX support (as opposed to allowing developers to merely use the Alpha5 JavaScript AJAX libraries in their hand-coded scripts), it is almost guaranteed that there will be far more support for visual previes of AJAX and page layouts in upcoming releases, including iframes and other complex components that the current WYSIWYG screen just can't handle properly.

[Hansolo]

Re: Files disappearing and corrupting while working on project.

Guys,

I just purchased V9 at the end of its product cycle hoping it is now matured and what I hear is that I need to wait for V10 to hopefully get a better product. That�s classic.

I believe all of you about the WYSIWYG problems but frankly I do not use it except for component placement and text formatting. Most of my HTML work is in the source editor and the problems I have had were after adding or editing xbasic scripts which I also do in the source editor.

Best,

[NoeticCC]

Re: Files disappearing and corrupting while working on project.

Guys,

I just purchased V9 at the end of its product cycle hoping it is now matured and what I hear is that I need to wait for V10 to hopefully get a better product. That�s classic.

I believe all of you about the WYSIWYG problems but frankly I do not use it except for component placement and text formatting. Most of my HTML work is in the source editor and the problems I have had were after adding or editing xbasic scripts which I also do in the source editor.

Best,

To clarify:

The WYSIWYG comments are related to components disappearing from an a5w page, they are not related to whatever you are experiencing with reports and other database items disappearing, I have never heard of anyone having reports/layouts and other items vanish from their files in this way. There seems to be major file corruption going on and this has never happened to me in this way, both in this system (source files on my work PC, publishing to a server on the Intranet) and in another system where the server and developer machine are the same box.

[Hansolo]

Re: Files disappearing and corrupting while working on project.

To clarify:

The WYSIWYG comments are related to components disappearing from an a5w page, they are not related to whatever you are experiencing with reports and other database items disappearing, I have never heard of anyone having reports/layouts and other items vanish from their files in this way. There seems to be major file corruption going on and this has never happened to me in this way, both in this system (source files on my work PC, publishing to a server on the Intranet) and in another system where the server and developer machine are the same box.

I understood what you were refering too and did not think the HTML WYSIWYG issue was causing any problems with reports or letters. However, the designe environment of reports and letters is also somewhat WYSIWYG and it is during using the design environment that those issues occure as well.

[NoeticCC]

Re: Files disappearing and corrupting while working on project.

I understood what you were refering too and did not think the HTML WYSIWYG issue was causing any problems with reports or letters. However, the designe environment of reports and letters is also somewhat WYSIWYG and it is during using the design environment that those issues occure as well.

As I said, luckily I never came across this, although it does pay to do regular backups and maintenance of your database files in case they become corrupted or your file server/PC becomes unstable

[Hansolo]

Re: Files disappearing and corrupting while working on project.

Thanks. I have only been developing this app for a week and a half. I would love to get to the point where I can do regular maintenance.