Check In/Out problems - Your experience?

Hi All I am having trouble with the DW Check in/out feature. I work with
one other person who is another part of the country. We both have ck in/out
enabled. We are repeatedly having trouble with updated files being
overwritten by outdated versions. For example, I'll change a file, and check
it on Monday. On Tuesday, my changed file has reverted back to it's old self.
This happens to files changed by both users. We haven't figured out why this
happens. We will be making an all out effort tomorrow to figure this out, but
I thought I would see what thoughts the forum users might have. Does anyone
else have trouble like this? Does anyone have any tips/tricks/advice for using
Check In/Out? Thanks in advance.

Hello,
Sorry to hear you're having problems with check in/check out. In order to help
you further I need some additional information.

- Which version of Dreamweaver are you using?
- What is your operating system?
- What protocol are you using to connect to your server (such as ftp, WebDAV,
local network, etc)
- For the files that do not contain your changes, are these files you've
edited then are edited by the other person?

If possible, could you provide the exact sequence of steps that you do which
result in the problem?

Thank you,
Sharon Selden

We're having the same type of problem which is causing big headaches.

User A checks out a file to edit via DW MX 7.0.1 ftp Mac OS 10.3.5, makes
changes and checks in. Changes are OK as shown in a regular web browser like
IE.

User B checks out file with Contribute 2 Windows XP version, makes changes and
Publishes via ftp Contribute. Changes are also OK as shown in a regular web
browser like IE.

User C checks out same file in DW MX Windows version 7.0.1 XP, makes changes
and checks back in. Changes made by User B are wiped out as seen in IE.

We tried once today to reproduce it but it worked OK. However it has wiped out
about 35 pages in the last couple of days with this same problem.

Any idea how we can avoid this? Is there some kind of cache that needs
clearing? It is a huge problem.

Are there anyone can tell me what can dreamweavre do?

Hi Sharon. Thanks for the reply. I'll answer your questions as best I can: -
Which version of Dreamweaver are you using? I am using MX04 on Mac OS 10.3.
The other person is using MX04 on WinXP - What protocol are you using to
connect to your server (such as ftp, WebDAV, local network, etc) We are using
DW FTP to connect to a remote server. - For the files that do not contain your
changes, are these files you've edited then are edited by the other person?
Yes. The file will be created, then changed. After the change, the file
reverts back to it's new state. - If possible, could you provide the exact
sequence of steps that you do which result in the problem? I wish I could.
Sorry I can't as I know that would be a big help. In posting to the forum, I
was hoping that someone with similar experience might say 'Oh yeah, had that
problem...just do this to avoid it!' Perhaps too optimistic on my part but
thought it was worth a try. Any advice you can provide would be great. dlc

Thanks for the additional information. I will look into this further.
-
sharon

I was unable to reproduce this, but have forwarded it to engineering for
further investigation. In the meantime here are some workarounds you can try:

1. Make sure that all Dreamweaver users have check in/ check out enabled and
Contribute Compatibilty turned on in their sire defintions.
-- If dreamweaver users do not have this on, then it is possible for them to
overwrite a file on the server with an older local copy.
2.Dreamweaver users before working on a file should "get" it, or use
synchronize to "get" the newest files from the server.

Thank you,
Sharon Selden

I came to this forum tonight because I am having this exact problem. I'm glad to see you are checking into it.

Terri

We have the same problem I descibed in my earlier post and we already do 1.

The DW users (with both contribute and check in/out enabled) double click on
the file to edit which causes a get, so we're also doing 2.

So, it must be something beyond your suggestions. Thanks anyway Sharon,
hopefully your team will keep looking and find out what's causing this.

We can't replicate this on demand either but happens often enough to be a big
problem. I'm not sure if this is related but the following happen sometimes
using DW:

1) on an attempt at checkout, we get a message saying that the file we want to
edit doesn't exist on the server (it does as evidenced by checking the server
via command line (ls -la)). We go on to edit the file (as it opens it anyway
for us) and then check in.

2) Sometimes even after checking in (with no errors reported by DW) and having
the lock symbols by the files in the file window, we check the server directory
and still see some .LCK files there on the pages we had successfully (or we
thought) checked in.

We haven't been able to determine if all these things happen everytime an
over-write occurs or not. So maybe they are related or maybe not. Either way,
these things should not be happening.

Hope this additional info helps!

Don

We have just run into a similar problem. One person is editing a site using
DWMX 2004 on Windows XP. Others are using Contribute 3. DW has Contribute
compatibility turned on and is using Check In/ Check Out. After investigating,
this seems to be the scenario:
DW attempts to checkout a file someone is editing with Contribute. DW
correctly indicated the file is in use. The Contribute user publishes the file,
the DW user checks it out, but gets the local copy, not the newer version. The
padlock still shows on the file in the file list. The file is edited in DW,
saved and checked back in. It overwrites the latest version on the remote site.
It seems that within an editing session, if DW encounters a checked out file,
it will no longer get the file from the remote site even after it has been
checked back in. Closing DW and restarting it seems to clear the problem.