defaria.com/blogs/Status/archives/week_2005_11_27.html

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  12    <title>Status for Andrew DeFaria: November 27, 2005 - December  3, 2005 Archives</title>
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  24                <h1 id="banner-header"><a href="http://defaria.com/blogs/Status/" accesskey="1">Status for Andrew DeFaria</a></h1>
  25                <h2 id="banner-description">Searchable status reports and work log</h2>
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  35                         <a href="http://defaria.com/blogs/Status/archives/week_2005_11_20.html">&laquo; November 20, 2005 - November 26, 2005</a> |
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  37                         | <a href="http://defaria.com/blogs/Status/archives/week_2005_12_04.html">December  4, 2005 - December 10, 2005 &raquo;</a>
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  39
  40
  41
  42
  43                      <h2 class="date-header">December  1, 2005</h2>
  44                      <a id="a000488"></a>
  45                      <div class="entry" id="entry-488">
  46                         <h3 class="entry-header">Code Page/create_dev_snapview.pl</h3>
  47                         <div class="entry-content">
  48                            <div class="entry-body">
  49                               <ul>
  50   <li>Researched further code page issues</li>
  51
  52   <li>Added Everest (Isreal0 team members to PQA</li>
  53
  54   <li>Added -reuse_stream parm to create_dev_snapview.pl</li>
  55
  56   <li>Handed a preliminary copy of bin_merge to Jennifer</li>
  57
  58   <li>Submitted defect to IBM/Rational regarding CharacterSetValidation and Code Pages</li>
  59 </ul>
  60
  61                               <h2>CharacterSetValidation Package is not that good</h2>
  62
  63 <p>We have a remaining issue where a user will attempt to update a defect and receive an error from the CharacterSetValidation package. I re-engineered CheckCodePage.pl to check through the Controller database but it didn't find anything. Investigated the CharacterSetValidation package a little more in depth - how does it validate characters? How does it do it differently than me?</p>
  64
  65 <p>Turns out that it merely does:</p>
  66
  67 <div class="code"><pre>
  68   if ($line =~ /[^\t\n\r -\177]/) {
  69     <i>error</i>
  70   }
  71 </pre></div>
  72
  73 <p>This odd regex seems to be merely checking to see if the characters are printable or not. I don't see how this would, for example, prevent a non US ASCII character like é from slipping through!</p>
  74
  75 <p>Narrowing it down a bit with my CheckCodePage.pl (which merely checks that characters are in the range of ordinal 0 - 127 (AKA the US ASCII character set) I figured out that the above regex was failing on characters such as ordinal 7 (Bell) and others. IOW characters that are technically in the US ASCII character set but that are not printable. Not sure how to resolve this problem yet...</p>
  76
  77 <h2>Submitted defect to IBM/Rational regarding CharacterSetValidation and CodePages</h2>
  78
  79 <p>Recently we upgraded our Clearquest database using 2003.06.15. With this version of Clearquest comes the usage of Code Pages. We choose to set our Code Page to US-ASCII. In upgrading our database we checked to ensure that all character data was within the US-ASCII character set (characters in the range of 0-127). Additionally we installed the CharacterSetValidation package as the Clearquest Administration Guide says:</p>
  80
  81 <blockquote>
  82   <p>The CharacterSetValidation package prevents clients running earlier versions of ClearQuest from entering data in a user record from a code page other than the data code page value of that database. If you do not apply the CharacterSetValidation package to your schemas, it is possible for users to enter unsupported data from the client and for data to be corrupted when modified on certain clients.</p>
  83 </blockquote>
  84
  85 <p>However it doesn't appear that the CharacterSetValidation package properly prevents unsupported data from being entered. Additionally it actually is causing us problems because characters that are valid US-ASCII are being flagged by the CharacterSetValidation package as unsupported.</p>
  86
  87 <p>US-ASCII is, according to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII:">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII</a>:</p>
  88
  89 <blockquote>
  90   <p>ASCII is, strictly, a seven-<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit" title="Bit">bit</a> code, meaning that it uses the bit patterns representable with seven binary digits (a range of 0 to 127 decimal) to represent character information.</p>
  91 </blockquote>
  92
  93 <p>Ergo US-ASCII is the characters whose ordinal values lie in the range of 0-127.</p>
  94
  95 <p>The CharacterSetValidation package installs a few Perl subroutines into the CQ schema that are supposed to check that the character data matches the code page of the database. However there doesn't seem to be any Perl code to check the difference between say a code page of US-ASCII or say Latin-1.</p>
  96
  97 <p>What it all comes down to eventual, as far as I can see, is a call to check_for_control_chars_in_line. The operative Perl code is:</p>
  98
  99 <div class="code"><pre>
 100 if ($line =~ /[^\t\n\r -\177]/) {
 101   return (" contains unsupported character(s):");
 102 }
 103 </pre></div>
 104
 105 <p>The above regex seems to be saying if the string $line is <b>not</b> a tab (\t), a linefeed (\n), a carriage return (\r) or in the range of space through \177 then an unsupported character has occurred. This does not include the entire US-ASCII range of 0-127. So if a client generated a yen character (¥) the above would not flag it as an unsupported character and yet (¥ - <span>ord</span> 165) is not a US-ASCII character.</p>
 106
 107 <p>Finally, since we only screened for US-ASCII in the 0-127 range, we have data that contains things like the US-ASCII Bel (ord 7) and the like that CharacterSetValidation is flagging as invalid.</p>
 108
 109                               <p class="entry-footer">
 110                                  <span class="post-footers">Posted by  at  4:58 PM</span> <span class="separator">|</span> <a class="permalink" href="http://defaria.com/blogs/Status/archives/000488.html">Permalink</a>
 111
 112
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 117
 118
 119
 120                      <h2 class="date-header">November 30, 2005</h2>
 121                      <a id="a000487"></a>
 122                      <div class="entry" id="entry-487">
 123                         <h3 class="entry-header">Stgloc/Code Page</h3>
 124                         <div class="entry-content">
 125                            <div class="entry-body">
 126                               <ul>
 127   <li>Tried to figure out why -stgloc is not working in Richmond nor why I can't seem to create a view in a share that is in an area where .stgloc exists</li>
 128
 129   <li>Worked with Vin Ton and Rob Swindell regarding a problem with CQ Web and Code Pages</li>
 130
 131   <li>Worked on other code page issues</li>
 132
 133   <li>Added CharacterSetValidation package to PQA</li>
 134 </ul>
 135
 136                               <h2>Stgloc problems</h2>
 137
 138 <p>Why does the following happen:</p>
 139
 140 <div class="code"><pre>
 141 Local:mkdir \\\\fs-rmna-01\\<span>viewstoreQA</span>\\adefaria_test
 142 Local:rmdir \\\\fs-rmna-01\\<span>viewstoreQA</span>\\adefaria_test
 143 Local:ct mkview -tag adefaria_test \\\\fs-rmna-01\\viewstoreQA\adefaria_test
 144 cleartool: Error: Attempt to get location information on "\\fs-rmna-01\viewstoreQA\adefaria_test"
 145 failed: Invalid argument.
 146 Local:ct mkview -tag adefaria_test \\\\ltsjca-adefaria\\views\\adefaria_test
 147 Created view.
 148 Host-local path: ltsjca-adefaria:C:\Views\adefaria_test
 149 Global path:&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; \\ltsjca-adefaria\views\adefaria_test
 150 </pre></div>
 151
 152 <p>I suspect that the problem is that this area is on a filer so Clearcase cannot determine where the view_server process should run. I believe that the only way Clearcase can figure out which server should serve the view_server process for this area is via the stgloc and that the stgloc for this area is not properly configured. Attempting to create views either through the command liine or the GUI using -stgloc viewstore or viewstoreQA also fail.</p>
 153
 154                               <p class="entry-footer">
 155                                  <span class="post-footers">Posted by  at  4:48 PM</span> <span class="separator">|</span> <a class="permalink" href="http://defaria.com/blogs/Status/archives/000487.html">Permalink</a>
 156
 157
 158                               </p>
 159                            </div>
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 162
 163
 164
 165                      <h2 class="date-header">November 29, 2005</h2>
 166                      <a id="a000486"></a>
 167                      <div class="entry" id="entry-486">
 168                         <h3 class="entry-header">create_dev_snapview</h3>
 169                         <div class="entry-content">
 170                            <div class="entry-body">
 171                               <ul>
 172   <li>Updated create_dev_snapview to support -tag, -dir and -load_rules.</li>
 173 </ul>
 174
 175                               <p class="entry-footer">
 176                                  <span class="post-footers">Posted by  at  5:10 PM</span> <span class="separator">|</span> <a class="permalink" href="http://defaria.com/blogs/Status/archives/000486.html">Permalink</a>
 177
 178
 179                               </p>
 180                            </div>
 181                         </div>
 182                      </div>
 183
 184
 185
 186                      <h2 class="date-header">November 28, 2005</h2>
 187                      <a id="a000485"></a>
 188                      <div class="entry" id="entry-485">
 189                         <h3 class="entry-header">bin_merge/create_snapshot_view/PQA</h3>
 190                         <div class="entry-content">
 191                            <div class="entry-body">
 192                               <ul>
 193   <li>Investigating issues with bin_merge</li>
 194
 195   <li>Discussed with Andrew about extending script to create snapshot views</li>
 196
 197   <li>Worked with two people who have had issues with accessing new PQA Clearquest database</li>
 198 </ul>
 199
 200                               <h2>bin_merge</h2>
 201
 202 <p>Spoke with Shivdutt about this. We decided that bin_merge should copy the binary file from the branch to the current view's checkedout copy and draw a merge arrow. Also, it should just draw an merge arrow if the user elects to use the from branch version. This mimicks a parent/child relationship that is assumed here</p>
 203
 204 <p>Still need to look into the Rebase to parent operation.</p>
 205
 206                               <p class="entry-footer">
 207                                  <span class="post-footers">Posted by  at  6:02 PM</span> <span class="separator">|</span> <a class="permalink" href="http://defaria.com/blogs/Status/archives/000485.html">Permalink</a>
 208
 209
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