Baffling bug - field becomes locked

[katiamp]

Hello

I'm having a maintenance problem with a fairly large system developed by a former employee of the company I work for. I've been developing FM projects for years, and I've never saw anything like this, so... I hope one of you guys can help me to "see the light" .

- Scenario: multiple-file solution (15 dbs) running from FileMaker Server on a G4; client-server access by 5 iMacs and 1 Dell PC.

- Problem: every now and then, with no apparent reason and without any fixed periodicity, one specific field in a list layout of a LineItems database gets "locked". A script is supposed to paste a value in this field (yep, it has to be a paste, circumstances do not allow to set the field), but when this happens the field remains blank, actually looking like missing - even its borders vanish.

- Solution, so far: go to Layout mode and back, without doing anything else. It comes back to work, as if nothing had ever happened.

I've tried to reproduce this, but couldn't. It only happens in that db, in that layout, with that field. Help!!!

[Kurt Knippel]

quote:

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Originally posted by Katia Maria Pimentel:

- Problem: every now and then, with no apparent reason and without any fixed periodicity, one specific field in a list layout of a LineItems database gets "locked". A script is supposed to paste a value in this field (yep, it has to be a paste, circumstances do not allow to set the field), but when this happens the field remains blank, actually looking like missing - even its borders vanish.

- Solution, so far: go to Layout mode and back, without doing anything else. It comes back to work, as if nothing had ever happened.

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Are you SURE that this is not simply a screen refresh issue? Filemaker has some strange screen refresh behavior sometimes, switching layouts, entering layout mode, etc often solves the problem.

[signal]

Could that specific record and that specific field be being accessed at the same time by two different computers?

[katiamp]

quote:

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Could that specific record and that specific field be being accessed at the same time by two different computers?

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re: Not likely. A script, activated by a button in Users db, copies data from a field and calls another script (in LineItems db) which creates a record, sets a couple of fields and pastes data into the field that is showing problems. Plus, this happens even if only one client machine is logged to the system.

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quote:

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Are you SURE that this is not simply a screen refresh issue? Filemaker has some strange screen refresh behavior sometimes, switching layouts, entering layout mode, etc often solves the problem.

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re: maybe... but then, why only and always this one specific field, in a list layout that has a dozen other fields? Yes, going to layout mode and back kind of solves the problem - I have even incorporated it as the step right before "paste", in the mentioned script. But then, I'm one of those persons that is always asking "why, why, why?" Why can't reproduce, why that particular field (a plain text field), and so on...