Ticket #158 (Open)Fri Nov 23 17:58:57 UTC 2007

Typo can break its database

Details by Andrew Hodgkinson (6):

In a test database (not the live one – IMPORTANT!) create an article with a future publishing date. Save it. Now edit the article before it reaches its publishing date and in passing, update that publishing date to some time even further in the future. Typo will then fail; you will be unable to access either the public or administrative interfaces. Log messages will be huge because Rails gets sent into a recursive loop and only bails out when stack space becomes exhausted.

It turns out that Typo creates two entries in the ‘triggers’ table, both for the same article ID. Typo fails to delete the first one when the publishing time is updated and this seems to provoke the failure. To recover the situation when this was first seen, I had to use ‘psql’ to edit the Typo database manually. I deleted all references to the article including both trigger table entries, but it would probably be sufficient to delete just the earlier of the two triggers and leave everything else intact. This should restore sanity and with luck Typo will go on to publish the article at the updated time. I have not tested this theory, though.

The latest version of Typo may have fixed this bug, but if not its root cause should be investigated and a patch produced for submission back to the official Typo tree.