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Removing a favorite

felipel

First, our specs -- we are running Teamsite 6.1 SP1 on Windows 2000. All of our users use CC Pro.

Now, the issue (which is minor, but annoying). We have some users who have favorites that they cannot remove. The favorite shows up on their list and regardless of whether they click Remove on the right side of the favorite or check the box and click Remove on the top right of the panel, the page simply refreshes and the favorite is still there. This only occurs on favorites that have been there for a long time -- if they add a new favorite, the system allows them to remove it.

So, two questions. 1. What would cause this? 2. How can we make them go away, regardless of what the cause was? We haven't been able to find any documentation on where those favorites are stored. Thanks in advance for any info!

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Michael

Hi

Good question Ben!

I'm not sure what the cause of your problem would be, and I haven't seen the same thing happen before.

However it seems that favorites are stored server side - as you can login to a different PC and see them. And they are specific to the user login. Therefore you might expect to see the details using the iwuser CLT. I have tried this on 6.0 but it doesn't display anything related to favorites -- you might want to give it a go on yours though as it is a later version (that is if you haven't already). You could also try deleting and recreating the user using iwuser (if the user involved doesn't mind).

As to what is causing it I can't imagine -- perhaps a good call for support? unless someone has more clues? I could only stab wildly in the dark and suggest some backing store corruption -- perhaps you could check that out if you have some downtime (and haven't done so already).

Cheers
Michael

Adam Stoller

Actually - I believe the favorites (bookmarks) are stored in the entity DB (iw_filesys_bookmark) and from a quick glance at some of them - I'd say they're probably encoded in something like Base64 - so it might be difficult to remove individual entries - but you **might** be able to just remove the entry from the particular entity or rebuild the entity db (I believe there are support articles for this) and fix the problem.

--fish
Senior Consultant, Quotient Inc.
http://www.quotient-inc.com

Migrateduser

This is a very helpful web tool when working with Base64, http://www.opinionatedgeek.com/dotnet/tools/Base64Decode/

If the encoding is, in fact, Base64, this tells you what's inside very quickly.

Dave

Current Environment(s):
(1) TS 6.1 SP1 on W2K3
(2) TS 6.1 SP1 on W2K
(3) TS 5.5.2 SP2 on Win2K

Adam Stoller

Okay - well according to that site, it isn't Base64 (or at least not *just* Base64) encoding ...

--fish
Senior Consultant, Quotient Inc.
http://www.quotient-inc.com

Michael

Indeed. It appears to be base64 -- but '.' isn't a base64 character so I presume they are concatenating their base64 strings together (with '.' as a seperator), but even when I take these snippets individually they don't all appear to be base64, however one was. Confusing...

Anyhoo, what ghoti said about it being stored in iw_filesys_bookmark seems correct. A user I have with many favorites has a much longer entry for this attribute then a user with only one favorite.

Cheers
Michael

pacer11

Hi,

I am facing the same issue as you have described above and I happen to have pin pointed that after the service pack 1 was installed I was not able to remove the favorites that I had before the service pack install but I could remove favorites that I have added afterwards.

Did you ever figure out a way to reconstruct the favorites entry in the Entities DB so that users don't loose any favorites but are able to remove those that they need to remove?

Thanks!

Migrateduser

I asked around and was given this information. Try:

iwprop <user> -d iw_filesys_bookmark

will get rid of just that property from the edb for that user.

The problem here this property is still in cssdk cache (which is part of the servletd process). A iwreset -ui is(unfortunately) needed to clear the cache on the servletd side.

A side note, the value of this property follows a serialized java object format.

hth,

lissa

pacer11

Lissa,

Thanks for the response.

What you have provided removes the property for that specific user which means they would have to go back and re-create their favorites list.

Should I assume that since I can not remove a favorite from the TeamSite GUI that the entity DB entry is corrupted, if so is this always going to be the case when installing service packs.

I guess if worst case comes to worst I can delete the property from the DB but I don't want to keep doing this everytime I install a patch/service pack so I kinda want to know whether I was suppose to do something extra as part of the service pack install so that I can not have this happen again.

Thanks!

Migrateduser

I don't know whether normal Service Pack installation creates this issue, but it shouldn't. I will ask more questions of different people. Stay Tuned!

lissa

kay_uwe

Hi,

just for info. We had had the same problem. But in our case we runned TeamSite in a manuell Cluster, so that we can switch from one to another Machine. What happened is, that favorites made on machine A couldn't removed on machine B. The Reason is, that TeamSite stored the hostname as a part of the Bookmark.

To solve the problem mark the remove-link in your favorites-view with the right-mousebutton, choose properties and copy the link in your clipboard.
Paste the link in the url-field of your browser and edit the hostname after the entry 'vpath=' to your old hostname. Then press Enter and the favorite is removed.

I hope this will help some user...

factura2.jpg

Adam Stoller

Hi,

just for info. We had had the same problem. But in our case we runned TeamSite in a manuell Cluster, so that we can switch from one to another Machine. What happened is, that favorites made on machine A couldn't removed on machine B. The Reason is, that TeamSite stored the hostname as a part of the Bookmark.

To solve the problem mark the remove-link in your favorites-view with the right-mousebutton, choose properties and copy the link in your clipboard.
Paste the link in the url-field of your browser and edit the hostname after the entry 'vpath=' to your old hostname. Then press Enter and the favorite is removed.

I hope this will help some user...

It would be interesting to know how this data is being encoded in the entities files (I believe it is, in part, base64 - but I don't know what the rest of the encoding/formatting is) - that way you could write some code to extract / modify / write the information from one server to another.

yanSi

A while ago I had a bonehead moment. I had a branch in my favourites. I wanted to remove the favourite, but I wasn't thinking straight so instead of clicking the remove link, I checked the box and deleted the branch. I even typed in YES to confirm the delete. Good thing we had no real work in that branch and had backups on cd.

I think deleting the assets pointed to by the favourites from the My Favourites page should be disallowed.

gzevin

A while ago I had a bonehead moment. I had a branch in my favourites. I wanted to remove the favourite, but I wasn't thinking straight so instead of clicking the remove link, I checked the box and deleted the branch. I even typed in YES to confirm the delete. Good thing we had no real work in that branch and had backups on cd.

I think deleting the assets pointed to by the favourites from the My Favourites page should be disallowed.

if you were able to delete a branch, you had at least admin privileges. Being an admin or master does presume that this person knows what he/she is doing... Smiley Very Happy

kay_uwe

It would be interesting to know how this data is being encoded in the entities files (I believe it is, in part, base64 - but I don't know what the rest of the encoding/formatting is) - that way you could write some code to extract / modify / write the information from one server to another.

Hi, this is an interesting Point but i don't know the exactly encoding from the entity-database. Fact is, that the hostname is a part of the stored informations. Maybe someone other knows it ???

kay_uwe

I Think i could help a little bit.

I tried to find out, what part of the entity-value is base64 coded an what not:

1.) every String is seperated by a dot
2.) the first String (from the Beginning to the first dot) without the leading 14 Characters gives nearly an good result by decoding with base64
3.) the second String is the same (without the 14 leading characters...)
4.) the following Strings are all the favorites...
5.) The last String has another seperator. There is an Underline '_'. The Part at the Beginning is the last favorite-Information. And the Rest is again TeamSite-Informations as the first and the second String.

Could anybody work with this Informations.

The Strings seems to have additional characters which i can't explain, yet.