Oxygen XML Forum

Hello,

One of our Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) was using Web Author to add a large section of information to an existing DITA document. As our company-wide fully-licensed Web Author system is still in the process of being set up, I suggested he use a trial of Web Author locally so he didn't have to edit raw DITA. He copied over the DITA files to the same directory as the samples, and used WebDAV to open them from there.

He then edited the files, saving regularly. There were no errors during saving, and autosave also appeared to work fine. However, when he revisited the document today, it appears nothing was actually saved.

It seems he had not realised the files were Read Only (as they'd been copied from our source control without being checked out..) and this, unsurprisingly, prevented them from being saved. That is to be expected - however, it's normal to receive a warning when files are not saved, and everything in the UI suggested the files had been saved correctly.

Saving to another filename works fine as expected, so there are no other permissions issues.

1) Is there any possibility his changes might have saved somewhere else? For example, a temp directory? That said, a search of the entire webserver directory has not revealed any files dated later than the originals aside from regular server files.

2) As this is the trial version, would this make a difference to receiving warnings, or will this happen on the licensed version too, once we have it set up?

Thank you!

Hello,

The files served by the builtin WebDAV server are found in the [oxygen.data.dir]/webdav-server/. This is the only place where they can be found.

This problem was probably caused by the builtin WebDAV server that did not properly handle the case in which the file was read-only. The builtin WebDAV server is intended to be used for opening sample files. We do not recommend using it in production - I added an internal ticket to mention this also in the User Guide. If you use Web Author with a connector for your versioning system, changes should be persisted in the VCS without problems. The user will be prompted to check them out before editing.

I tried to reproduce the problem you mentioned by setting one of the sample files as "Read-Only" (from the Windows "Properties..." dialog). Web Author showed an error when trying to save the document by pressing Ctrl+S. Autosave was stuck with the "saving..." status. Can you tell us what was different in your case? Did you use a different operating system? How was the file configured as read-only?

Best,
Cristian

Thank you for your reply!

I'm surprised the WebDAV server is not intended for use in production. I know WebDAV is a bit old, so perhaps that is why? Once our company-wide server is set up in the next few weeks, we'll be using the proper source control connector, but this seemed like a good short term solution for an emergency edit.

The engineer was using Windows 10 64 bit with Chrome, so nothing unusual. We tried changing one of the sample files to read-only, and it still appeared to save correctly (but did not). This time we set the read-only flag through Explorer, but with the other files it had been set by the source control system.

We had a play around, but we couldn't make it produce an error - it always claims to save when it has not (unless the file is not read-only). Unfortunately my own trial has expired now (and I use a licensed oXygen XML Author anyway!) or I'd see if it does it on my PC.

Hello,

I'm surprised the WebDAV server is not intended for use in production. I know WebDAV is a bit old, so perhaps that is why?

Web Author has a WebDAV client that can be used in production. It is already used by many of our customers with a CMS that implements the WebDAV protocol or with an Apache HTTP Server.

Web Author also comes with a builtin server that was intended as a way for people to try the editor without having to deploy a file server. This server stores the samples that come bundled with Web Author. This is the part that is not intended for production use.

We finally managed to reproduce the issue. We made a fix and published the updated plugin on GitHub [1]. You can install the new version and install it in Web Author using the Administration Page [2].

Best,
Cristian

[1] https://github.com/oxygenxml/web-author ... 1%2Bro-fix
[2] https://www.oxygenxml.com/doc/versions/ ... ugins.html

Thank you very much for sorting all that, and so quickly as well - it's much appreciated!

I'm glad to hear we can use WebDAV for production - although hopefully it will not be needed in a few weeks time.