Known Issues

Applies to Collaborator 11.5, last modified on December 21, 2021

These are the major known issues currently known for all Collaborator components.

Many of the issues have workarounds; those are given here as well.

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Known Issues With Collaborator

  • Currently, the default SCM configuration chosen on the SCM page of the Visual Studio Extension's Options dialog does not synchronize with the SCM system specified via the ccollab set scm command. Avoid calling SCM commands simultaneously from the Visual Studio Extension and from the Command-Line Client.

  • If a push or merge request in GitLab affects more than 100 files, the integration will process only first 100 files from the request and add those files to a review. This is caused by the limitation on the GitLab API side.

  • Dump for a single review could include remote system data from the interconnected reviews as well.

  • The built-in PDF viewer of Windows 8, 8.1 and 10 do not support overlay layers in PDF files. Collaborator uses such layers to render coordinate comments (pushpins) in PDF versions of review materials for archived reviews. Because of this, pushpins will not be displayed if the PDF file from the archive is opened in the built-in PDF viewer of Windows 8, 8.1 and 10. As a workaround, please install the Adobe Acrobat Reader or any other full-featured PDF viewer.

  • Excel files with high column counts may cause severe performance degradation when viewed in the Collaborator web application (for example, for review of differences). Depending on the processor and memory resources of the client machine, this may be noticed at varying numbers of column counts. For a typical desktop, experimentally we have noticed that approximately 500 columns is where performance begins to suffer noticeably and 3000 columns is the point at which it becomes infeasible to effectively work with the Excel file in question.

  • Double quote characters (") in custom field names may break Oracle reporting views. Custom field names become column headers in the views, and Oracle does not allow double quotes in column names. Because of this, Collaborator removes double quote characters from the names of custom fields when it creates reporting views for Oracle databases.
    If some custom field names differ only by double quotes this would result in an "ORA-00957: duplicate column name" error in server logs. To resolve the issue, you may either remove one of duplicate column names from the reporting view, or rename the custom fields to avoid coincidence.

  • Loading large dump files to Oracle may take up to a full day to complete. This appears to be an issue with Oracle driver and is under investigation.

  • On Oracle databases, Collaborator does not search the contents of custom fields by default (since this significantly reduces search performance). Instead, the search results page display additional fields that define in what areas to perform new search. In this panel you can enable searching in custom fields.

  • When uploading .doc and .docx files, the 'Track Changes' feature is not supported. If you do not want to see all of the content from all versions, you will need to accept all of the changes in the document before adding it to the review.

  • If the installer cannot find a JRE on your system, it will prompt you for the location of a suitable JRE. On systems with multiple JREs installed, it may be necessary to specify to the installer which JRE should be used for Collaborator. On Windows platforms, running the installer with the -manual argument will suppress the JRE search and cause the installer to prompt for the JRE location (specifically, java.exe). On *nix platforms, you can specify the JRE location by setting the INSTALL4J_JAVA_HOME_OVERRIDE environment variable to the JAVA_HOME value.

Known Issues With the Server Component

  • When the server is running on Linux systems, there can be issues with unavailable fonts or available fonts with sufficiently different font metrics that can cause the reporting engine to not render content. Workaround: Install the Microsoft True Type fonts (msttcorefonts on Debian-based systems).

  • If your charts are not being displayed, verify that <Collaborator Server>/tomcat/temp exists and is writable by the user that runs the server.

Known Issues With the Web Client

  • Search results may not return all results without noting the truncation. This can happen if many results match the search but are inaccessible to the user.

  • Home screen cannot display more the 999 open reviews.

  • Custom reports with a large number active columns or filters or with long filter text can break the bookmark, SQL, Printable, and CSV links in Internet Explorer. Because the links contain all the filter information, the URLs can exceed the Internet Explorer's maximum URL length (2083 characters).

    Workaround: Use Firefox or Chrome for complex reports

  • Character set differences that change the location or number of line breaks can change the way comments get promoted.

    Workaround: If necessary, use the auto-detected character set to make comments and mark conversations read.

  • Character set differences that change the location or number of line breaks result in metrics that may not be perfectly correct. The metrics for files are computed using the auto-detected character set.

  • If there are multiple files with the same filename (but different paths) in a review, the automatically linked filenames in review text (custom fields, chat, and so forth) may not link to the intended file.

Known Issues With Anti-Virus Software

  • Anti-virus software is known to interfere with launching sub-processes and communicating with SCM clients. If you experience any problems with a Collaborator client hanging or getting unexpected results, and you have anti-virus software running, disable the anti-virus software and try reproducing the problem. If you subsequently contact technical support, let them know that you have anti-virus software running.

Known Issues With the Command-Line Client

  • Control Characters in text are replaced with the Unicode Replacement Character. This is most often encountered with smart quotes pasted into changelist descriptions.

Known Issues With the GUI Client

  • Because of technical issue with GTK3, GUI Client on Unix/Linux operating systems may fail to display table data on Add Changelists, Add Commits, Add Transactions and similar pages.

  • Git users on Windows systems may need to modify their path to allow the client to detect their SCM. The default Windows system PATH entry defaults to "...\git\cmd". Changing this to "...git\bin" should allow the client to properly detect the SCM when the client is launched from the tray notifier.

  • If your PTC Integrity server uses IPv6 connection, GUI Client cannot map the server host name. As a workaround, you will need to add the IPv6 address of your server to the hosts file on your machine. The hosts file resides at /etc/environment/hosts on Unix and at %SystemRoot%\System32\drivers\etc\hosts on Windows.

Known Issues With Eclipse Plug-in

  • Conversations View in Eclipse Oxygen does not split long line of text into multiple lines, because of this a horizontal scroll bar can appear if your conversation of checklist item contains long text.
  • CollaboratorEclipse Plug-in is shipped with the Google Guava library version 20. Other Eclipse plug-ins may use another versions of this library and in some rare cases this may cause dependency conflicts.

Known Issues With Subversion Integration

  • Directory entries are ignored, so adding an entire directory does not show up in a review.

  • Symlinks are not supported pre-commit. A Symlink uploaded pre-commit will show invalid content in a review.

Known Issues With Team Foundation Server Integration

  • "Unable to determine the source control server" error can occur when adding modified files. There must be a corresponding Team Foundation Server working folder for the directory configured in the GUI client, or the directory specified for the command line client to avoid this error.

  • Team Foundation Server integration will not work with non-English installations of Visual Studio .NET. Regional settings for other locales are supported, but installing a non-English Visual Studio prevents correct parsing of tf.exe output.

Known Issues With JIRA Integration

  • Currently, Collaborator cannot populate values of arbitrary custom fields. If your JIRA server requires certain custom fields to be set during the creation of tickets/items, then Collaborator will be unable to create new tickets/items.

  • Due to technical issues, JIRA 7 cannot display the Review Information block automatically. As a workaround you can manually make the Review Id, Review Participants, Review Phase and Review Link fields be visible on your JIRA screens.

See Also

References

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