Error Message When Uploading Files

Bruce Bates

Based on my observations on a number of different forums, and on my own experience, the following problem seems to be occurring to a few forum members. An error message appears when uploading a file using the attachment manager.

From my own experience, here is what I see happening. The file upload is nearly complete, it's getting to the point of returning to the attachment manager window, and the error message appears instead. The error message is the same useless one that usually appears, which seems to indicate a server-side error, but there is no indication of what the error is. The message appears to be a skeleton message which is probably a default message.

If the default error message was to be replaced by something meaningful, perhaps something specific could be determined. As it is now, one has no way of knowing what to report in any meaningful way.

Regards,

Bruce Bates

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Mike Green

From my experience, this message occurs early in the upload process. It consistently occurs with Safari, but seems to happen less often with Firefox 2. If I remember when I think to upload a file, I switch to Firefox.

Bruce Bates

All of my experience with this problem has been with MS Internet Explorer, although I guess I could try using Opera to see what it does. Presently I have to use Opera if I want to use the Control Panel function. Picky forum system IMHO.

Odd that yours Mike should be so early on. Perhaps there are two different problems.

Seems like little attention is being paid to this support section in any case, other than our own replies to one another.

Thanks for your response Mike.

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Programming can't be all that difficult, it's nothing but 1's and 0's

Bruce Bates

Just now I tried Opera, as promised. The test was 100% successful, and one heck of a lot faster than with MS IE!

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Involvement and committment can be best understood by looking at a plate of ham and eggs. The chicken was involved, but the pig was committed. ANON

Bruce Bates

Recent attempts at uploading with Opera have failed, so I guess the prior testing wasn't as promising as I'd hoped. At this juncture, I have stopped attempting to upload anything. Failures occur almost every time.

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Involvement and committment can be best understood by looking at a plate of ham and eggs. The chicken was involved, but the pig was committed. ANON

Phil Pilgrim (PhiPi)

It may not be your browser, but your files. I've had difficulties uploading GIFs from time to time. There's a particular GIF format that Windows doesn't like, which disdain seems to be mirrored by the Microsoft ASP webserver software used in the forum. I can usually fix it by reloading the image into Corel PhotoPaint and fiddling with the palette. But I'm as yet unable to isolate the exact form that Windows and the server reject. Aside from files that are too big, though, that's the only issue I've had with uploading. I use Opera and never use IE.

-Phil

Bruce Bates

Phil -

I only wish that were so, since I rarely if ever upload .GIF files. My uploads were more common types: .TXT, .PDF, .DOC and similar types. It may be my operating system (Win XP), as it's been nothing but a pain for the .ASP

I would think it would help for either the server, or one of us doing these predictable, failing uploads, to have the missing error routine installed. That way perhaps we can get a handle on this continuing problem. I don't have the knowledge to do it myself, but I'd be MORE than happy to install something written by someone who does, such as yourself.

Obviously this is not a carte blanc invitation for anyone to hack my computer
It surprises me that there has been no response from anyone from Parallax on this topic. It goes back a few weeks now.

Bruce

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Involvement and committment can be best understood by looking at a plate of ham and eggs. The chicken was involved, but the pig was committed. ANON

Post Edited (Bruce Bates) : 3/24/2008 1:34:54 PM GMT

Zoot

In my experience, problems w/upload have generally been mime-type issues with the browser. E.g., in Safari, the .bs2, .bsp, etc., extensions are not recognized as a known mime-type and upload fails. Common binary types seem to be less of a problem.

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stevenmess2004

In Safari I have problems uploading *.spin files. Like zoot says this may be a mime-type issue as they are recognised as a Spin-Report by the OS. Also had problems with some types of files when I was using firefox (I think it was an older version). It does seem to be related to the types of files for instance *.zip and *.txt files both upload fine with Safari.

Phil Pilgrim (PhiPi)

I find it especially odd that a Mac would rely on the filename suffix to determine a mime type for upload. Don't Mac files include a "resource fork", independent of the suffix, that points to the app that generated them? It seems that this would be a more reliable mime indicator than the suffix.

-Phil

Zoot

Not if the app is not installed -- for some reason .sxb and .bs2 do not come up as text types even though they are text. Of course, you can set them to be so via preferences. The default security filters seem to dictate that "unknown" file types are treated as possibly threatening binary applications, so it munges them.

Also, the "resource fork" is for older OS; OS X is a *nix variant.

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stevenmess2004

The orignal release of Mac OS X started using the extension for the file extension. Somewhere along the line they went back to using the file extension and what is in the resource fork. Unfourtantly the unix link mucked a couple of nice things up but that's life. I think that the resource fork has always existed in Macs because it is part of the file system and not the OS. Happy to be corrected on any of this though.