[Silva-general] fullname error

[eric casteleijn]

Marc Petitmermet wrote:
> silva-1.5.8
> 
> on tuesday night we experienced all of a sudden the following error  
> (traceback at the end):
> 
>   Error Type:  AttributeError
>   Error Value: fullname
> 
> running a script (see http://www.mat.ethz.ch/silva_cms/scripts) we  
> could determine that there where 7 images, 2 index files and 1 normal  
> silva document addected by this problem. analyzing the object it  
> seems that they have lost their metadata information. the error  
> appeared everytime silva asked for fullname(). this means that e.g.  
> the smi preview tab of the images worked properly.
> 
> the consequences of this fullname problem were extreme: almost the  
> complete public site did not work anymore, almost all pages showed an  
> ugly fullname zope error! the funny thing was that we only had to fix  
> *one* of those faulty silva documents the problem was apparently gone.
> 
> i ask myself where and why does silva need the fullname in the public  
> view? i searched through the layout code of the eth and the single  
> location where the fullname is used is in the sitemap. but we have  
> disabled the display of the author names...
> 
> in the meantime we have just recreated these objects which fixed the  
> fullname problem. but i don't know what created it and if it will  
> happen again. is it possible to catch errors with the metadata so  
> that not almost a complete site breaks because of one single object?  
> maybe this problem is already fixed in silva-1.5.10?

I'm not sure, I'm going to have a look. The problem, I think is that the 
silva-extra metadata uses a python expression to get that fullname. That 
should only ever be allowed if it is 100% certain that no errors will be 
thrown by that expression, because that does, as you've said, 
potentially break an entire site.

I'll discuss here what the best solution is.

-- 
- eric casteleijn
http://infrae.com