Hi Everyone,
I have been doing some follow-up investigations that I thought you might
like to be made aware.
First, why? Well after testing the file that I recreated by copying the
text, formula and styles I could not cause the error to occur again.
This is what I reported yesterday. I then proceeded with importing the
few images and 'artwork' objects from the old file to the new. After
several saves and sheet manipulations I noticed the file became unstable
again.
The outcome of my investigation was that one of the image files used on
one of the sheets had become corrupted* and adding this file in caused
the file to become unstable - eventually exhibiting the problem I
mentioned about not being able to save after a sheet was deleted. These
'corrupted' files are relatively benign with the error only becoming
apparent *once* you attempt to delete the sheet. So somehow the error
caused problems with the broader 'workbook' structure not the sheet
structure. Although I compared files between different versions of the
file the XML were too varied (usually style names and definitions;
content was identical).
* note I say corrupted but it rendered OK and only resulted
in the observed behaviour one a sheet is deleted. I 'deem' it
corrupted as once replaced with a clean version render and
saved as a new file by GIMP, the problem disappeared.
The error was with the particular corrupt objects. On recreating new
images and inserting them into a file I have not been able to trigger
any problems. If I cut-and-paste from the original 'corrupt' file the
file becomes unstable after a few saves and sheet manipulations.
So the steps for salvage is...
1. recreate a new file with the exact number of sheets as the original.
Ensure each sheet names are the same.
2. Cut and Paste each sheet. Make sure you 'Paste special' limiting the
content being placed in the new file to text, numbers, date& time,
formulas and formats.
3. If you have images in the file. Recreate / Save using another
package. As mentioned I used GIMP.
4. Insert new copies of the images into file. *Don't* cut-and-paste
objects from the old file.
5. If you have any lines, text boxes and artwork; recreate them from new.
During this process...
- Save as a new version (+tabs, +data, +images, +other objects)
following each step.
- Test each version thoroughly before proceeding.
- Only add one object at a time, so if something goes wrong you can
isolate the problem component.
- To check it is not a bug try and recreate with a fresh file.
A couple of quick notes that may be valuable to others...
- ODS files are archives. Use an archive facility to extract the data
inside. Inspect the contents in the folders to see what is different.
- On every 'Save as' the file size changes. This is not due to changes
in the file contents, but rather in changes in how the components of the
file is compressed/archived. If you open a file, add objects then save,
the file size with be so big. Open that file and "Save as" a new name
and the file will be a different size. If you extract the files the
contents of all the files and directories are identical. It is just the
internal archive facility in LO will decide the best compaction routine
based on what it encounters.
- The content.xml file can be quite large and has no internal
end-of-line characters. This make it difficult to open and be parse by
various text editors, xml viewers and comparison facilities. To insert a
EOL character after the end of each tag (i.e.>), I used the following
command in the terminal (requires Linux).
cat content.xml | sed -e 's/>/>\n/g'> content_with_linebreaks.xml
cat just spews the content of the text file to the standard output.
I then pipe it to sed, where I used regular expressions to find '>'
and replace every instance of it with '>\n'. I then compared the
contents with Diffuse.