Troubleshoot Chandler

Chandler Desktop

Problem: When I sort items by triage color, they don't seem to be in the right order

Solution: Click on the "Triage" button in the toolbar, or press F5

Problem: On Windows, launching Chandler gives an error saying that Chandler is already running

Solution: Use the Task Manager to kill the Chandler.exe process

• Can occur on Windows when using the close box on the upper right of Chandler window. This closes all the Chandler UI but sometimes leaves the background processing running.
• Open the Windows Task Manager, go to Processes tab, select Chandler.exe, use the End Process button to kill the invisible Chandler.
• Now you can launch Chandler and it will run.

Problem: I can't open my repository any more: Chandler gives me an error on launch.

Solution: You need to migrate your repository

• When you upgrade to a new version of Chandler, you old repository (the database where all you data are saved) is likely to be incompatible with the new one.
• You can migrate your data using these migration instructions.

Problem: I moved to a new machine and I can't open my repository

Solution: You need to migrate your repository

• Although Chandler is cross platform, the repository (the database where all you data are saved) format is platform specific.
• When moving to a new platform (say, from Windows to Linux), you need to export your data to a neutral format first and reload that file on your new platform. The Chandler export .chex format is such a neutral platform format.
• The instructions are the same as in the migration case with the additional step of copying the .chex file from the old machine to the new.

Problem: I lost an item

Solution: Search your Dashboard

• Under some circumstances, the item you are editing may get out of view or, because of auto triage, you simply can't find an old item.
• You should try to use the Search feature:
  • Put yourself in the widest possible selection: select All in the toolbar and select the Dashboard collection in the sidebar
  • In the text widget located in the toolbar, type /find and a text hint related to the item you're looking for, for instance type /find "interns presentation" to find all items with the sentence intern presentation in them.
• Note that Chandler's search supports the Lucene query syntax for advanced searches, for instance /find john AND "intern presentation" will find all the items that contain both john and intern presentation.
• Note to use wildcards in your search string you need to search using the command /lucene. When using /search or /find wildcard characters are escaped before being passed to lucene.

Problem: Chandler seems to be blocked, I can't edit anything

Solution: Try to repair your repository from the Tools menu

• It's possible that some data are in an inconsistent state. You can try to run a check on your repository and repair it.
  • Go to the Tools menu and choose Repository>>Check.
  • A message will be displayed in the status bar (at the bottom of Chandler's window). It'll first simply say "Checking repository...". This may take a while depending on your machine and the size of your data.
  • When completed, the message will tell you if the check was successful or not and how long it took.
  • If the check was completed with errors, you should run the Repository>>Check and Repair option in the same Tools menu. This will try to get your repository in a consistent sane state.

Problem: Chandler quits on launch or won't start

Solution: Repair your repository using the Control Launch dialog

• This may happens if your repository reached some inconsistent state. Chandler has now a launch option that allows you to choose some repair procedures before loading the repository in memory.
• Start Chandler, and hold down the Ctrl (Control) key
• A start-up options dialog will appear, giving you a list of choices:
• The first choice is to simply start Chandler as usual. If Chandler was failing to launch properly, this is unlikely to help.
• The next 5 choices give you various clean-up options in order of increasing depth and data loss:
• Do internal clean-up, but save my data and preferences will simply clean up User Interface related issues
• Discard recent changes until data integrity tests pass will clean up inconsistencies till the check passes successfully
• Discard recent changes until application no longer fails to start will do the above and go back through your repository's history till Chandler launches
• Discard my full-text index and reindex all my data will delete internal index tables and rebuild them. This may take a while.
• Discard all my data and start with a fresh repository will simply delete all your data and start afresh. You should almost certainly make a snapshot of your repository and submit a bug report before trying this.
• All of the repair option will lose some data. They might be internal data that you don't really care about but you may lose some personal data in the process. Before choosing any of these, you may want to first use the Make a snapshot of all my data to submit with a bug report, then quit option. This will save your repository as is in a compressed .tgz file. If you choose to report a bug, you'll be able to upload this compressed repository to OSAF repository submit page.

Problem: One of my collection shows the "!" danger icon in the sidebar and I've no idea what's wrong!

Solution: A sharing error happened, syncing often solve the problem

• Hover your mouse over the "!" icon in the sidebar next to your collection. A tooltip will display that will tell you which error it is.
• More often that not, sharing errors are temporary (because your wireless connection dropped down during a background sync for instance). Simply syncing again will solve the problem.
  • Check that this collection syncing has not been turned off. Select your collection in the sidebar. Then, under the File menu, select Suspend Syncing and check to see if anything has been suspended. If it has, select that item to turn syncing on again.
  • Sync happens on a schedule. To force sync a specific collection immediately, select that collection in the sidebar. Then under the File>>Sync submenu, select your collection (should be the first name in the list) to sync.
  • Monitor the messages in the status bar (bottom of the Chandler main window). Transient error messages that you may have missed the first time will display there.
• If this doesn't solve the problem, you may need to contact the technical people handling the server where this collection lives. To know more about the issue, bring up the Share>>Manage... dialog. If there's a sharing error, a View Error Details... button will appear at the bottom. Clicking that button will pop up a dialog giving you the content of the sharing log for that collection. Select and copy/paste the relevant text so to send it to the relevant technician. This will help people handling the sharing server to diagnose the problem.

Problem: I don't see the time of the events of my calendar

Solution: Change the vertical spread using the "Visible Hours" feature

• If you display too many hours in a day, your events can be crammed into too small a vertical space in the calendar, and there may not be enough room to display both time and title for some events.
• By choosing to display fewer hours per day, your events get more vertical space:
  • Go to the View>>Visible Hours menu and choose a smaller number of visible hours.
  • Experiment with several till you're comfortable with the trade-off between size and number of visible events.
• When you have fewer hours displayed, you can scroll through the day using the scroll bar on the right.

Problem: There are way too many things showing up in my Dashboard

Solution: Consider moving some collections out of your Dashboard

• When you subscribe to a new collection, you may have chosen to keep the collection in your Dashboard. This tends to overcrowd your Dashboard. Try marking some collections as not being in your Dashboard:
  • Select the collection in the sidebar
  • In the Collection menu, check the Keep out of Dashboard option
• Consider doing this for all collections containing events that you want to keep track of but do not participate in regularly (e.g. your favorite sports team’s schedule, co-workers’ and friends’ calendars, etc).

Problem: I forgot the URL I need to send so that others can see my collection.

Solution: Use the “Copy Ticket URLs to Clipboard” menu item.

• If you want to invite other people to share a collection you have subscribed to or published, you need to give them a Ticket URL. However, these URLs aren’t displayed anywhere in Chandler. You can copy them to your machine’s clipboard, which allows you to paste it into an email (or instant message):
  • In the sidebar, select the collection you want to share.
  • In the Share menu, select Copy Ticket URLs to Clipboard.
  • Paste the clipboard into the email you want to send to invite. Clean up any unnecessary text (e.g. remove the View and Edit line if you want to share a View only version of your collection)

Problem: I deleted my repository and re-entered my Sharing Account information, but I still don't see my shared collections.

Solution: Restore your published shares.

• If you needed to start from a clean repository (on a new machine for instance), you may want to recover the collections you previously published on a Chandler Server.
• After entering your User name and Password in the Accounts... dialog, you might be surprised to find that your shared collections don’t appear in your sidebar. You need to restore them first:
  • Under the Tools menu, choose Save and Restore>>Restore Published Shares...
  • In the dialog, select the sharing account, and then select the collections you want to restore (you can multi-select collections).
• This tip can also be used if you have a sharing account, and want to subscribe to your shared collections from more than one computer.

Problem: I can't use Chandler from behind my company firewall

Solution: Set up your Hub account to not use SSL

• Go to the "File>>Accounts..." menu to display the accounts settings dialog
• Click on the drop down under the left hand list and choose "Chandler Server Sharing"
• In the "Chandler Server Sharing" account form, use the following values (in bold, mandatory values):
  • Description: My non secure Chandler Hub
  • Server: hub.chandlerproject.org
  • Path: /
  • User Name: your hub username
  • Password: your hub password
  • Port: 80
  • Use SSL: unchecked

Chandler Hub

When I go to https://hub.chandlerproject.org/welcome I don't get a login screen?

If you don't see anything at all when you go to the login screen, something is seriously wrong. There's likely some sort of serious network problem occuring that we're scrambling around trying to fix.

You may see an explicit "Chandler Hub is down" type of page, in which case things are serious, but we're in control enough to at least be able to tell you we're down. In this case, please just try again later or look at the [[http://blog.chandlerproject.org/][Chandler Project blog]] to see if there are any announcements.

When I try to log in, I get refused.

The most likely explanation for this is that you've mistyped either your username or password. First, be sure that you've typed them both correctly. If you are not sure that you remember this information, you can click the link near the bottom of the page with the login prompt in order to recover your username and password.

I signed up for an account but can't log in?

Did you receive and answer the account activation email?

You say I was supposed to receive an activation email, but I haven't.

Have you checked your spam folder? It seems like that's the answer almost every time.

If you're at a big webmail provider, there are widespread reports of mail getting dropped without notice.

I've tried everything I know but I think I need a human to help me out.

There are several avenues for you to contact a human:

• You can send a message to the chandler-users mailing list (you do not have to subscribe in order to send a message), which is the public mailing list for questions about Chandler products.
• You can join the appropriate IRC channel, and interact with the members of the Chandler community in real time.
• You can send a message to hub-admin@osafoundation.org, which is a private mail alias read by a few members of the OSAF staff. Please note the hub-admin address there must have some text removed before it will work, as a spam-prevention measure. Sorry for the hassle.