[5.0 Beta] Standalone blank UI upon restart

KrisJ

Hi,

While playing around with Standalone 5.0 and the 5.0 Safari Add-on on macOS in relation to this discussion:

https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/63853/no-pdf-attachments-from-science-sciencemag-org-with-ezproxy#latest

I tried to restart Standalone.

Upon restart, the UI remained mostly blank, no entries, tags visible. Buttons could be clicked but nothing happend. Several menu options such as 'report errors' would also not work.

https://flic.kr/p/QZcHSk

The preference panel could still be opened but logging out of my account and back in would not solve things.

When I renamed ~/Library/Application Support/Zotero to ~/Library/Application Support/ZoteroOLD

Restarting standalone now resulted in re-creation of ~/Library/Application Support/Zotero and magically, all was well again.

https://flic.kr/p/PTpd5h

I can provide the contents of the apparently 'broken' Zotero folder if that would be useful.

dstillman

OK, seems to be the same issue as https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/63865/5-0-beta-library-wont-load

I can provide the contents of the apparently 'broken' Zotero folder if that would be useful.

That would be very helpful. If you can ZIP that up and send it to support@zotero.org, that would be great. You should move signons.sqlite out of the folder before compressing (but keep it around in case it turns out to be relevant). Thanks!

dstillman

Hmm, actually, can you first confirm that this doesn't recur in subsequent runs? (That's what's happening for the person in the other thread.)

KrisJ

@dstillman Now that you mention it... it indeed re-occurs after a while, but not immediately.

I think it starts when I close Firefox... but I'm not sure

In any case, I just emailed one of the broken Zotero folders from ~/Library/Application Support/

EDIT:

FF is not involved. After restarting once or twice, the UI blanks out again...

KrisJ

It is bizarre.

After deleting the 'Zotero' folder from App Support and signing in again, Standalone will restart without issues only once.

A second restart will result in a blank UI.

I made copies of 'Zotero' at each time point and compared each snapshot with a diff tool and this allowed me to find at least one offending file:

https://flic.kr/p/R7q2F5

If I add the line:

'InvalidateCaches=1' to 'compatibility.ini'

I can recover standalone from it's 'blanked UI' state.

https://flic.kr/p/QAysQS

I will also zip all of these snapshots and Email them.

dstillman

This should be fixed in the latest build, 109. Thanks for your help with this.

KrisJ

Yes indeed, good stuff... Thanks a lot!