[Booki-dev] Reinstalled Booki, now picture uploads don't work

[Tuukka Hastrup]

15.06.2011 04:27, James Simmons kirjoitti:
> When I try to upload a picture I press the Upload button and NOTHING
> happens.  I am uploading to the default directory for the book, and
> even when I create a brand new book specifically to test uploading
> pictures NOTHING happens.  It seems to me that the code is trying to
> do something it can't, perhaps through no fault of its own, and it
> just decides to pretend nothing happened.  No log messages, no helpful
> message boxes, nothing.  If I don't have a permission set or a
> directory is missing or something like that it should TELL ME.  The
> exception handling in Booki seems to be nonexistent.

A developer's point of view: The exception handling is not nonexistent 
but it's not close to complete either. Unfortunately, complete exception 
handling and great error messages are one of the most laborous parts of 
software development: anything can go wrong so users seldom encounter 
the same situations. Web sites have it a bit easier with HTTP helping to 
define the interface between the web server and the web browser: even a 
HTTP status code such as 500 Internal Server Error is better than 
nothing. On the other hand, too detailed error messages can reveal 
confidental information from the server to the remote user.

Booki is more a web application than a web site, which adds more 
complications with Javascript code and asynchronous HTTP requests (AJAX) 
that are not normally visible in the web browser.

As a remedy, I can suggest installing the Firebug extension to Firefox. 
When something is not working, you can click the bug icon to open it to 
look under the hood. In the "Console" tab, you can see any Javascript 
errors and all AJAX requests. If requests appear, you can click them to 
access in tabs what was posted to the server and what was the response.

> I don't want to muck around with the database unnecessarily.  So far I
> haven't lost my book, that is I can reconstruct it somewhere else like
> Sigil if I have to.

A backup copy of your database is good to have in any case.