Asset in web client view makes all assets disappea

We are having a very strange issue where an asset is responsible for making all other assets in a container not visible. This is only happening on the web client and seems to be user specific? The user who is having the issue is a member of the MBP Admins group and has full permissions to the entire app.

The user asked me to look at a container where they knew a number or assets were located using the web client. The container displayed the number of assets in the folder but not the assets or any of the metadata itself; it was blank where the assets thumbnails would be in the page. When I went to the folder, web client and desktop client, I could see all of the assets in the folder and could retrieve them all from MediaBin; the user could view and retreive them but only from the desktop client.

How I determined that a single asset was causing the issue was to have the user use the desktop client and one by one move the assets from one folder to another, each time checking the web client for the result. Four or Five assets into this they moved one that when placed into the second folder then made all of the previously moved assets disappear. When the asset was moved back out of the folder the assets she had previously moved would be visible again on refresh of the page. Doing this for one folder of assets was fine but they are having this issue with more than one folder.

I then downloaded that asset and deleted it from MediaBin, again when this asset was removed from the system all the assets in the container it had been hosted in became visible once more. I then tried a couple of test, first opening the asset in Adobe Photoshop, making a change to the asset, saving that change, and then saving it out as a new file with a new name. I dropped this file back into MediaBin, but in a test folder with a couple of other assets in it, and had the same result, the files that had previously been in the folder were no longer visible to that user though I could still see all the assets.

We finally acquired new media for this asset and added it to MediaBin as a new asset and that worked. This behavior seemed to start after a failed upgrade attempt where we had to roll back and restore part of the database.

I’m looking for any insight on this and have lots of questions:

Why is the behavior of the web client to hide all the assets?
Why does this seem to be user specific?
If this were DB corruption why would the asset be fine in the desktop client?
Could this be a cashing issue, if so I though MediaBin did no client side cashing?

Thank you.

Find more posts tagged with

Comments

lyman

I can only share suspicions. You really should get in touch with support@interwoven.com.

If you can access the assets without incident through the native application, the problem is almost certainly client side. I suspect that somehow the client may have a mismatch in versions (that is just a guess given the symptoms).

For the record, MediaBin does cache client-side. In this case the "client" either refers to the machine running the native client or to the web server (i.e., not the machine invoking the web browser).

The first place to look to see if there is anything amiss server-side is the mbp.log. If there are no obvious errors in there, you should consider enabling the net.log Logs are configured by modifung the registry entry:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE/MediaBin Inc./MediaBin/Platform/Current Version/Logs/NetworkTrace

make sure the On and Append are both set to 1.

Once the problem is resolved you may want to turn On to 0 as this log can get bulky.

This will point out (or exclude) the server. If the problem, a ssuspected, turns out to be client side there are further steps best pointed out by support.

Cheers,

Lyman Hurd
MediaBin Server Team

MediaBin Server Team
Interwoven, Inc.

Migrateduser

This error is typically caused by invalid metadata associated with the "problem" asset. Depending on what version of MediaBin you are running, the web client may have problems decoding time values that are invalid. Perform the following steps to determine what metadata might be causing the problem:
- create a test folder
- copy the "problem" asset into the folder- you should not be able to see the asset in this folder via the web client
- reconfigure the columns displayed to show only the asset name (select none from the configure columns page)
- retest to determine if the asset appears
- assuming it is now visible, add each column, one by one, back into your display profile, testing after each column is readded
- when the asset fails to display, note what the last column readded was - this is the metadata that is causing the problem
- go to the native client and examine the value of that metadata

Yo_Adrian

Thank you for your reply.
This actually made me remember that we had a similar issue back in version 2 that we tracked to a specific metadata field.

So we followed the steps you provided and removed all of the metadata fields from view and when we refreshed the client sure enough all the assets appeared. We then added back the fields that had been displayed and it was in the "Photoshop caption" field were we found the problem. We downloaded the asset from the system and open the file in Photoshop. Looking under "File Info" we found that the "description" field in Photoshop is mapping to the "Photoshop caption" field in MediaBin. Taking the data from that field in Photoshop we did a few tests with the metadata trying to determine what the cause was but it wasn't until we copied out the metadata from the file info in Photoshop and pasted it into Notepad that we found that the metadata had been entered with hard returns to break up each line of text. We removed the returns making it a single line of text, with spaces, and copied that back into the Photoshop file. We saved the file and uploaded it into MediaBin and the file displayed fine as well as all the other files in the folder also were displayed now, so hard returns in the metadata cause the display issue.

Please test this for yourselves, I have a couple of different ways now and the results are the same. As soon as a file whose metadata has a hard return in it is added to a folder and that folder is selected to display the corresponding metadata field the assets will no longer display in the folder. I also noticed that in the windows client if there is a hard return breaking the lines of data in a field only the metadata up to that return is displayed even though there is more data in the file in that field. In one of the files I was testing with there were three lines of data broken up with hard returns. I could view all of the data in that field in Photoshop but once added to MediaBin you could only see the first line displayed in the windows client and the asset would not show up in the web client.

So I assume this is a bug? Do I need to submit this as a bug with support or will that be taken care of from this conversation?

Thank you.

Migrateduser

Thank you for the effort in tracking this problem. I tried to duplicate the problem in the latest version of the web client and it seems to replace hard returns with a space, but doesn't seem to have a problem displaying the metadata. What client version are you using? Perhaps the problem has been fixed in a release later than what you are running. If possible, can you attach a copy of a file that is causing the problem to occur?

In the Native Client, you should be able to simply expand the vertical height of a field to see all the metadata.

Edited by MediaBin_MTS on 12/08/05 07:37 AM (server time).

Yo_Adrian

Thank you for your help with this. We updated to the 4.5.2 version of MediaBin and this error seems to have been corrected. The items that were experiencing the issue outlined above now show all of their metadata in the web client and the assets are now visible in both clients.