Conference iosg::all-in-1_v30

3805.0. "Why do WPS-PLUS documents get corrupted?" by GIDDAY::JOYCE (Smoke On The Wallabies...) Tue Jan 25 1994 00:07

This note is posted in the IOSG::ALL-IN-1 and MAGIC::WPS-PLUS conferences.


	Ever since I've been working with ALL-IN-1/WPS-PLUS (9 years) I've 
	encountered "corrupt" documents.  These have usually been fixed by
	replacing the user's WPSDEF.WPL and GOLD-Getting the corrupt document
	into a new one.

	The reasons WHY the document and/or WPSDEF.WPL get corrupt have always
	been a bit vague; large cuts and pastes (but HOW large?), big documents 
	(again, HOW big?), scrolling through the document using GOLD Up and
	GOLD Down too many times (but HOW many?), etc. etc.

	As a prolific WPS-PLUS user myself I frequently do ALL of the above
	and yet have NEVER had a corrupt document myself.  Neither have most
	"superusers" I know, and these girls really put WPS-PLUS through it's
	paces!  So, maybe there's another cause - some sequence of keystrokes/
	actions that an "idiot" user does?

	A customer of ours down here in Sydney has one of these idiot users; 
	he has almost a thousand "busines critical" documents in a shared IOS
	V.30 drawer (most of which created under V2.4 ALL-IN-1) and it seems 
	that almost every one of these is corrupt in some way.  He gets varying
	degrees of errors when he edits them, from "corrupt record encountered"
	to a full-blown stack dump.  We have tried changing his WPSDEF.WPL and
	recovering some of the documents using GOLD-GET but that seems only to
	be a temporary solution.  New documents (created since getting a new
	WPSDEF.WPL) get corrupted, as do documents which had previously been
	recovered.  My guess is that he is editing one of the remaining 
	corrupted documents and this is somehow "infecting" his WPSDEF.WPL.
	Subseqent edits and new documents are consequently corrupted.

	An $ANAL/RMS on the .WPL files shows no errors.

	As I say, he has a VERY large number of documents - most of which are
	"business critical" (although he would say they ALL are) and it is
	not practical to GOLD-GET all of them into new documents.  Furthermore,
	in order to GOLD-GET selected non-corrupted pages of a corrupted 
	document you have to edit the document first to see where the 
	corruption lies and this, of course, compounds the problem.

	So, my questions are;

	1)	What REALLY corrupts a document/WPSDEF.WPL?

	2)	What has actually happened internally when a WPS-PLUS
		document is "corrupt"?

	3)	Can a corrupt WPSDEF.WPL "infect" documents being edited?

	4)	Is it true that a WPS-PLUS document's whole history is stored
		in it, and that a GOLD-GET will clean this out?

	5)	Would splitting this idiot user's large documents (50+ pages)
		down into smaller documents have any lasting benefit?

	6)	Is there any tool available to "recover" these corrupt documents
		in batch, rather than going throug the manually intensive
		GOLD-GET solution.  (Document Transfer to DX doesn't always
		work with some of the idiot user's documents - it stack dumps).

	What our customer finds frustrating is that we can't tell him WHAT he
	is doing that is corrupting his documents and therefore what he
	should avoid doing in future!  Of course, he can't remember exactly
	what he does.  The only thing that I think may be significant is that
	most of his documents are used as "source" documents for paragraph 
	numbering (though I don't see why PN would affect the source document
	myself).

	Hopefully someone can shed some light on this matter?

Thanks, Andy