oops - what now?

[bialio]

I can't be the only one this has happened to. Hopefully someone can help me out.

So I have some changes in the XML file I've been running for the last few days. At some point I must have introduced something bad, because after restarting Sage the STV with all my changes won't load any more. I get a message with no info other than 'NullPointer'. The logs don't seem to have any details other than a line saying that it's trying to load the XML file.

Is there a way to debug this further? And hopefully recover?

btl.

[PLUCKYHD]

I never have been able to debug one at that point or recover it but my XML knowledge is limited.

Backups

[GKusnick]

Here's what I'd try, in roughly this order:

1. Make sure you have all STVI plugins disabled, to make sure they're not interfering somehow.

2. If that doesn't help, bring up the file in a browser window to make sure it's well-formed XML. IE is pretty good about pinpointing errors in XML syntax.

3. If it passes that test but still doesn't load into Sage, WinDiff it against the last known working version to see if you can spot any errors that way. (You do make frequent backups of your dev state, right?)

4. If nothing jumps out at you as obviously wrong, WinDiff can still give you an idea of what you changed recently, so you can start from a working backup and redo those changes manually.

If you don't have a useful backup, you can always try steps 3 and 4 using the base STV you started from to compare against. There'll be more changes to eyeball and redo, but it's better than doing it all again from memory.

[razrsharpe]

ya ive never been able to recover from that scenario... so i always try to save multiple backups (basically save a copy anytime i change something i dont want to do again )