I'm asking you all because it's not clear to me how to interact with the AT
developers directly - the response back from the ATUG list is rather slow,
and I'm hoping you can give me a technical explanation a la "no, because..."
rather than just a "no".

We're trying to adopt Archivists Toolkit at Colgate. We don't have a Java
developer in-house, but I'm exploring whether I can learn to address minor
issues myself.

We're a small liberal arts college, so library policy is to out-source as
much infrastructure as possible (meaning open source is generally avoided).
So the MySQL database is hosted on a Lunarpages server, and I can't adjust
the timeout at the server level. But I'm suspecting that the timeout we're
seeing is not a timeout of the given MySQL transaction, but instead a
problem with Hibernate persistence.  The symptom - we edit a record, proceed
to child records that require much editing - the chunk of data that my
people are trying to enter at one time takes over 10 minutes to edit.
During their editing the child records, an error occurs.  AT has added error
code to sense that when this is a JDBCConnectionError, then it forces you to
restart.
       if(errorText.contains("JDBCConnectionException")) {
            String message = "Database connection has been lost due to a
server timeout.\n\n" +
                "Please RESTART the program to continue.  If the problem
persists, consult your System Administrator.";

So what I did was add a "&connectTimeout=3600" parameter to the
SessionFactory database URL.  But I still seem to have trouble with the
timeout.

Now, I acknowledge that understanding Hibernate and how it interacts with
JDBC and altering code in AT may be getting over my head, and that what I
probably should try next is either putting the database on my local MS SQL
Server instance, or my test-server instance of MySQL (I don't have a local
production instance of MySQL), and abandon the hosted server.

But can any of you add to my knowledge base here, and tell me:
 - is it possible to correct this problem easily in the AT code?
 - is the JDBCConnectionException due to the MySQL server timeout that is
set by &connectTimeout?
- is simply adding a parameter to the database URL an effective way of
making sure that that parameter is used in each opensession instance?
- I know I have a lot to learn about hibernate - I've located a book to skim
in Books24x7 - I'll try wikipedia to get a briefer intial grounding. Any
other advice?


Cindy Harper, Systems Librarian
Colgate University Libraries
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315-228-7363