Question

There seems to be some strange behaviour involving action searches.

The example query-by-example search form in the ActionTrackerPlugin topic does not work. It seems to be because the default value for state can not be .* - which is what's in the form. It apparently has be be either a valid value (open, closed, etc) or the state query must be entirely absent. A "straight" action search (no form), for example
%ACTIONSEARCH{ who="MarcusLeonard" within="60" state=".*" }%
fails. If people are copying and pasting this example, they may have trouble because of this.

Also, ACTIONSEARCH appears to ignore the within parameter. If I enter
%ACTIONSEARCH{ who="MarcusLeonard" within="60" web=".*" topic=".*" }%
it returns things over a year old. (This behaviour is the same with query-by-example form.)

I've just picked up something else. If there is a SEARCH in a topic, neither ACTION nor ACTIONSEARCH will work. The page breaks entirely, with the error message
Can't locate TWiki/Plugins/ActionTrackerPlugin/Action.pm in @INC (@INC contains: [lots omitted]) at ../lib/TWiki/Plugins/ActionTrackerPlugin.pm line 570.

This is the same error as for another problem I've just reported: ActionTrackerBreaksCairoWebHomeTopics.

Environment

-- MarcusLeonard - 10 May 2005

Answer

Did anyone figure out why the action searches are not working?

-- SaumitraBhaumik - 16 May 2005

Hmmm state=".*" outght to work, I need to investigate that. When you say "a year old" what do you mean? Can you provide an example of an action that is being picked up but shouldn't be?

-- CrawfordCurrie - 28 May 2005

../lib/TWiki etc looks like a relative path issue. Set an absolute path in twiki/bin/setlib.cfg.

-- PeterThoeny - 07 Jun 2005

Looks like this was the relative path problem that Peter pointed out. I hate it when the simple stuff gets me - Thanks Peter.

-- MarcusLeonard - 10 Jun 2005

I am seeing the same problem with the "within" parameter.

"within=8" gives me all action items from the past up to 7 days into the future.

"within=-8" gives me action items from 7 days ago into the future.

"within=0" gives all action items from tommorow into the future.

"within=-1" gives all action items from today into the future.

"within=1 gives all action items from the past up to today.

Either the documentation is wrong or the code does not do what was intended.

-- PhilipIsaacson - 21 Jun 2005

I'm also finding that the web= parameter in the ACTIONSEARCH seems to have no effect. I'm trying to place an ACTIONSEARCH in each User's topic on the Main web that lists the user's action items in topics on another hidden web. If I place the ACTIONSEARCH within the same web as the Action items, then it seems to work fine but placing it on Main or any other web results in no results.

Incidentally, the actionnotify web= parameter works as expected.

-- AndrewRobinson - 02 Aug 2005

First of all, many thanks for the TWiki system and plugins.

This week I installed the latest action tracker plugin. I had some problems with search. It appeared that ActionTrackerPluginDev contains a patch Action.diff that repairs search for state=".*". Looking quite good now.

-- PeterHuisken - 02 Sep 2005

There appears to be no ready-made solution (yet) to this issue with the action searches. I my case, the action searches with the following syntax is picking up a few open actions from some webs, while ignoring some other open actions in the other webs: %ACTIONSEARCH{web=".*" who="SaumitraBhaumik" state="open" }%

Can't make out why the action search is not able to pick up open action from some specific webs only!

-- SaumitraBhaumik - 17 Oct 2005

I was struggling with the last version of the plugin as it broke the Action Searches, and because of that Action Notifications also became useless. We were keen to get the new version working because it has fixes to some of the critical issues (for us, most of our users are in Solaris/Linux & use Mozilla) like the issue with editing actions using Mozilla. Also when users just copy-pasted the action syntax (with uid) from an existing action to create a new one, multiple actions used to have one single uid, thereby making it impossible to close the cloned actions (this is also fixed in this version as a new/unique uid is created for every new action on save).

I had tried the Action.diff patch, but it didn't help, Action Searches were still failing.

Fortunately, one of the members of my team (a PERL expert) seems to have found a fix for this. He has modified the ActionSet.pm file. After that Action Searches are working perfectly. Note that I am using the original Action.pm file (& not the updated one in Action.diff). Attaching the diff file showing the diffs between original ActionSet.pm & the one we have modified; also attaching the updated ActionSet.pm file.

• ActionSet.pm.diff: Diff file showing diffs between original ActionSet.pm & the modified one
• ActionSetUpdated.pm: Modified ActionSet.pm file

Hopefully all others having problem with the Action Searches in the latest version of the plugin will get benifited with this.

-- SaumitraBhaumik - 19 Oct 2005

Saumitra - just tried your fix and it works perfectly. Thanks very much for posting this.

-- GrahamMcCorkell - 18 Nov 2005

I'm seeing a slightly different weird behavior. I have two different webs with actions in them. From web 1, I can do a simple search (e.g. ACTIONSEARCH{open}) and it works fine. From web 2, the same search (incorrectly) returns an empty list. Now, the odd bit - from web 2, if I do a search like ACTIONSEARCH{web="web1"}, I still get an empty list. From web 1, that same search (with the web reference) works fine. From web 1, an ACTIONSEARCH{web="web2"} returns an empty list.

So, bottom line, I can't do any searches within web 2, and I can't find web 2's actions from anywhere. I tried Saumitra's fix, and it didn't change anything. Any ideas?

-- AaronSher - 02 Feb 2006

Problem resolved. It turns out that (in our installation), Twiki itself is case-insensitive for page names. Thus, if I go to the page Web1.WebHome, I'll see the page. However, if the web is really named WEB1, my searches won't return any results unless I go to WEB1.WebHome.

-- AaronSher - 03 Feb 2006