This file contains descriptions of noteworthy problems found in and not yet resolved in ClearCase LT Version 2002.05.20. Any functionality or characteristics described here that refers to 'ClearCase' applies to ClearCase LT as well.
The ClearCase Product Family development group switched to a new change request system after ClearCase 4.0 was released. ID numbers differ between the old and new systems. This document lists both numbers. The new number appears first and includes a CMBU prefix. The former four- or five-digit number, if one exists, appears in parentheses.
The following are the known problems in ClearCase LT Version 2002.05.20.
#CMBU00002462 (#7328) permissions problem building over winked-in derived object
#CMBU00028068 (#31461) diffbl does not work with imported baselines
#CMBU00028214 (#31626) changing activity name breaks link with ClearQuest record
#CMBU00028372 (#31797) removal of branch may result in errors in snapshot view
#CMBU00029594 (#33174) integration stream property sheets may not show delivered activities
#CMBU00030053 (#33672) adding large number of files from Windows Explorer fails
#CMBU00030700,#CMBU00032384 (#36267) Print to File option does not work
#CMBU00030951 (#34653) defect in MMC taskpads causes Admin Console problems
#CMBU00031803 (#35608) predefined attribute not displayed on property sheet
#CMBU00032161 (#36013) problem checking in identical .frm files in Visual Basic 6.0
#CMBU00032286 (#36156) certain file names cause problems in snapshot view
#CMBU00032491 (#36391) MSWord terminates abruptly when ClearCase "SaveAs" initiated
#CMBU00032695 (#36614) opening multiple ‘nested' ClearQuest forms may cause crash
#CMBU00033213 (#37203) clearhistory produces extremely small text on Japanese system
#CMBU00033224 (#37214) ClearCase may not recover from Windows 2000 Hibernate mode
#CMBU00033455 (#37464) pre-checkin trigger causes problem in Visual Basic projects
#CMBU00033922 (#37995) Merge Manager displays duplicate dynamic views in list
#CMBU00034354 (#38464) no reporting of ClearQuest script error text
#CMBU00034355 (#38465) must kill ClearQuest server to see schema upgrade
#CMBU00034481 (#38606) changes to UCMCustomQuery1 do not appear in dialog box
#CMBU00034719 (#38869) Refresh button may vanish in ClearCase Administration Console
#CMBU00034976 using Browse button in Share dialog hangs Visual Basic integration
#CMBU00034809 externally removed view still appears as Web interface session
#CMBU00042553 Diff Merge tool does not display multibyte characters correctly
#CMBU00043178 using Web interface with Netscape causes error messages
#CMBU00044722 using ClearCase LT Web Interface, problem overriding primary group
#CMBU00045914 problem running multiple instances of regsvr32
#CMBU00045923 ClearCase Explorer dialog items clipped in simplified Chinese version
#CMBU00046779 'clearprompt -list' output is limited to 512 lines
#CMBU00046883 Source Output window no longer displays ClearCase status messages
#CMBU00047155 elements with Cyrillic names are not handled correctly
#CMBU00048303 lsclients command no longer shows if release is patched
#CMBU00050929 tutorial fails if username contains period or space characters
#CMBU00053473 problems with old version of Base ClearCase-ClearQuest integration
#CMBU00054601 'cleartool ln' displays incorrect error message in case of duplicate name
#CMBU00054897 files are rendered as double-spaced after removing carriage return markers
#CMBU00054904 Add View Shortcut dialog stalls when diskette drive is offline
#CMBU00055513 Netscape doesn't list integration stream when creating a UCM project view
#CMBU00056755 limitations on deliver/rebase status display when using Netscape Navigator
#CMBU00056786 using Report Builder with dynamic views requires local administrator privileges
#CMBU00056810 UCM pre-defined queries are broken when upgrading to package UCM3.0 or UCM4.0
#CMBU00057114 interoperability issues running UNIX Web server and Windows ClearCase Web client
#CMBU00057168 occasional problems using 'Back' button on Netscape 4
#CMBU00057568 creating symlink to VOB root from child directory works but produces spurious messages
#CMBU00057758 XML Diff Merge does not support UTF-8 Byte-Order Mark
#CMBU000 57983 avascript error when navigating to certain directories with symlinks
When your build script builds over a target without first removing it, the script must retain the permissions of the built-over DO. Your view maintains these permissions correctly, but the data container created by the MVFS gets new, potentially different permissions. As a result, subsequent attempts to build over the target may fail.
The ClearCase Type Explorer and Properties Browser always display information about local copies of global types, instead of displaying information about the global type.
If the client VOB you are browsing does not contain a local copy of a global type, the ClearCase Type Explorer does not display the global type.
The cleartool diffbl command, which compares two baselines and shows the differences between them, does not work correctly when one or both of the baselines are imported baselines.
When a ClearCase activity in a ClearQuest-enabled project is linked to a ClearQuest record, the Name of the ClearCase activity is set to match the ClearQuest record's ID. This allows you to access the corresponding activity when you are working on a defect by using the current defect number. For example, you can use the command
We recommend that you do not change the name of a ClearCase activity, although ClearCase does not prevent that. If you change an activity name, you cannot use the setactivity command as illustrated above.
Note that the Headline field for a ClearCase activity is synchronized with the corresponding field in a ClearQuest record. That is, if you change this field from within either ClearCase or ClearQuest, the corresponding field in the ClearQuest record or ClearCase activity is modified as well.
If a branch is removed from within a snapshot view, any loaded elements from that branch should remain in the snapshot view. However, when trying to list such an element, the program displays the error
The error is generated when attempting to list an element if the branched version of the element was previously selected by the snapshot view, but the branch has since been removed. Note that the element still exists in the VOB and the view, but cannot be listed by cleartool ls.
In the Project Explorer, the Activities tab of the baseline and integration stream property sheets does not list the activities that have been delivered to the integration stream and incorporated into the baseline. The Activities tab displays only activities that were created in the integration stream, including integration activities, which ClearCase generates during deliver operations.
If you attempt to add a large number of files to source control from within Windows Explorer, the operation fails. To add a large number of files to source control, use the cleartool mkelem command instead.
The Print to file option of applications such as Microsoft Word does not work for an MVFS file. Attempting to print to file within the MVFS may result in the error access denied or the application may appear to hang as it continues to try to write the file. The problem is that the mechanism used for this function uses an identity that does not have the proper credentials for the MVFS to be able to validate it. The workaround is to print the file to a file outside the MVFS (such as a local or network drive) and then copy it into the MVFS from there.
There is a bug associated with taskpads in the Microsoft Management Console, version 1.1 and 1.2, that causes problems in the ClearCase Administration Console. The problem occurs when you follow this sequence of steps:
Select All VOBs or All Views node from the navigation bar of the Administration Console. The program displays the associated taskpad.
Select a VOB or view-tag from the taskpad list, and then click Manage storage.
After the storage for that node has been successfully displayed, click the MMC back navigation arrow to return to and display the previously selected taskpad.
Workaround: Use either of the following methods to work around the problem:
Note that with MMC 1.1, resizing the console window refreshes the list; resizing has no effect in MMC 1.2
The cleartool describe command lists predefined attributes for some objects. This output is likely to change at a future release. Specifically, settings that represent UCM information are likely to be removed or replaced with a more abstract representation.
By default, ClearCase software does not create a new version of a file that is identical to its immediate predecessor. When you attempt to check in a .frm file that is identical to the checked in version, the integration does not check it in. However, if the .frm file has an associated .frx file, the integration checks in the .frx file as a read-only file. To avoid this problem, set the option to allow identical checkins.
Files with names such as AUX.ext, CON.ext, PRN.ext, or NUL.ext, where ext is any file extension, can be loaded into a snapshot view, but cannot be unloaded from the view or deleted from the system. This makes it impossible to delete parent directories of such files as well. We recommend that you avoid using files names that are identical to the names assigned to basic system elements.
We recommend that you not initiate an Add to Source Control operation from the ClearCase menu that appears when you right-click in the SaveAs dialog in MS Word. This may cause your Word application to terminate abruptly, and could possibly cause data loss.
The UCM/ClearQuest integration does not prevent you from opening a ClearQuest form, then going to the form's UnifiedChangeManagement page, then using the shortcut menu in the change set to open a ClearCase dialog box, and then selecting Activity Properties, which opens a second ClearQuest form.
However, if you follow the above steps, the second ClearQuest form does not function correctly. In particular:
Therefore, we recommend that you not use the above procedure to open a second ClearQuest form.
The font used for text and captions in the History Browser is 6 point type by default. This point size produces difficult-to-read output in the History Browser on a Japanese language system.
Workaround: To enlarge the font, click View>Options>Display>Fonts and select a larger font.
Windows 2000 includes a Hibernate feature that allows the state of the current running system to be saved and restored quickly later on. Active ClearCase processes, as well as processes that have the ClearCase Network Provider loaded, may have TCP connections to servers on remote machines; such connections are likely to be closed by the servers while the system is in Hibernate mode. Therefore, the ClearCase client applications are likely to return errors when a user attempts to use them after the computer has been brought back from Hibernate mode.
If you create a new element in one activity (for example, A) while the directory containing the element is checked out to a different activity (for example, B), you have created an implicit dependency of A on B. When selectively delivering activity A, you must also include activity B. Otherwise deliver reports the error: DBID not found.
In Visual Basic when you attempt to add a project to ClearCase by clicking Tools>ClearCase>Add Files to ClearCase, the operation fails if the VOB in which the Visual Basic project resides has a trigger that requires users to enter a comment when checking in files. The Visual Basic IDE does not supply the comment that you enter in the Add to Source Control dialog box to the trigger.
To work around this problem, use ClearCase Explorer to add the project to source control. After you add the project to source control, checkin and checkout operations complete successfully from within the Visual Basic IDE.
Occasionally, when merging a file with Merge Manager, the combo box that indicates the view to be merged from, displays two instances of each available dynamic view. In this situation, you can click either dynamic view to select it. The symptom is not known to cause any problems.
Using the UCM-ClearQuest integration, you can customize the Check Before Deliver ClearQuest Visual Basic policy script. However, if the script as customized contains an error that causes the Visual Basic interpreter to display an error exception, the Deliver dialog box reports this error like this:
It does not report the actual error exception text which would enable the user to diagnose the problem script
Workaround: To see the error exception text, use the cleartool deliver command.
Using the UCM/ClearQuest integration, if you upgrade a ClearQuest user database to a new schema revision, in order to see the change on a client machine which was connected to that user database, you must do the following on the client machine:
When using the UCM/ClearQuest integration, the list of records displayed in the dropdown list on the Add To Source, Check Out and Check In dialog boxes is generated by running the UCMCustomQuery1 query, which can be customized. (Note that in order to see the effect of your changes, you must use the File>Save menu item to save the query edits.)
However, if you copied the Public Queries UCMCustomQuery1 query into your Personal Queries folder and edited it there, the changes are not immediately seen. To see your changes, you must stop the integration server process:
On Windows NT or Windows 2000:
After stopping the process on your computer, open the dialog box again. Further edits to /PersonalQueries/UCMCustomQuery1 show up automatically without having to shut down the process again.
While displaying a view private file in the ClearCase Administrator's or Host Console, resizing its column headers or displaying the shortcut menu causes the Refresh toolbar button to be hidden. If this happens, you can access the Refresh action by using the Action menu pull-down, or from the shortcut menu of the view private file's display.
When using the ClearCase integration with Microsoft Visual Basic, do not use the 'browse' button in the 'share' dialog, or you may cause the application to hang. Instead, either supply a complete path to the share dialog using the edit box, or avoid using the dialog at all.
If a user's web view is deleted from outside the web interface (e.g. with a "cleartool rmview" command on the web server), it will no longer show up in the Select View page of the web interface, even though the corresponding view location area on the client may still exist. There is no indication that the server component of the view disappeared.
The output of most cleartool commands that display date information uses an invariant format that ignores regional standards.
Clients using Netscape Navigator may cause error message similar to the following to appear in the web server logs:
File does not exist: /usr/atria/web/applets/com/ms/security/PermissionID.class File does not exist: /usr/atria/web/applets/com/ms/security/PolicyEngine.class
These error messages are harmless and can be ignored.
When the ClearCase LT Web server running on Windows logs in a client, it sets the primary group to the designated primary group in the client user's domain account. In ClearCase LT software, you cannot override this group setting. As a result, sites that use domain mapping to allow user accounts in multiple domains to share VOBs cannot access those VOBs through the ClearCase LT Web Interface.
The Server Logs node of the Clearcase Administration Console may display the names of several logfiles that never have any content on a ClearCase LT Server. These logfiles include:
On WIndows, running multiple instances of regsvr32 to register the same .dll in the same VOB and view may cause the machine to hang.
When running ClearCase on a simplified Chinese version of Windows, the labels on dialog boxes are clipped. This effect results from a bug in Microsoft Foundation Classes. Microsoft has no known workaround for this problem.
You can install ClearCase LT software as a point product on the same machine on which you install a Rational Suite. If you later uninstall the Rational Suite, the icon for ClearCase LT software is removed from the desktop, but the product is not uninstalled. The ClearCase LT program is left on the computer as is its reference in Start>Programs. The icon should not be removed, because ClearCase LT software must be uninstalled separately. As a workaround, you can manually put the icon for the ClearCase LT Explorer on the desktop.
On Windows, clearprompt -list only displays the first 512 lines in a list of items. The remaining items are ignored.
To enable logging text to display inside an IDE, the user must set the registry key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Atria\ClearCase\CurrentVersion\SCC\DebugTrace = 1 (or = 3 for additional logging to a file). This logging mechanism works for any IDE that supports messages from an SCC provider.
A Not a VOB Object message appears if you select Add to Source Control. In this case, the SCC proceeds to add the element to source control.
There is a bug in Microsoft library, which affects a display of extended characters within cmd.exe. We know Cyrillic and German characters are affected. This problem only happens within cmd.exe when cleartool.exe is used.
Usernames that have a period in them (for example, j.doe) or a space (for example, jane Doe) will cause the ClearCase tutorials to fail. Create a username without any periods and spaces before running the ClearCase tutorials.
While you can view and manipulate UCM trigger types using the ClearCase Automation Library (CAL), you cannot currently apply these trigger types to UCM objects from CAL.
There may be situations where the original Windows version of the Base ClearCase/ClearQuest integration ("V1") fails to see the expected ClearQuest database because of outdated or incorrect description information that is maintained in the Registry. The error message that results is
"Error trying to logon to the ClearQuest database"
If this occurs do the following:.
Using regedit, check the following registry entries and correct the information if necessary, where version is the ClearQuest version, e.g. 2002.05.20 and user is the current user name.
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Rational Software\ClearQuest\version\Common\CQIntSvr\user
Using the Windows NT Task Manager or similar tool appropriate for your operating system, locate and end the process: cqintsvr11.exe. The process will automatically be restarted as needed and will check the registry for the latest values of the keys in Step 1.
When trying to create a VOB symbolic link with the same name as an existing link, youl get the error
Can't modify directory because it is not checked out. Unable to create link: "M:\path\file".even when the parent directory is checked out. The command executes correctly but the message should indicate that the link could not be created due to the presence of an existing link with the same name.
On Windows 2000, if the Diff Merge tool is already set to show the carriage return markers on the display, and those markers are turned off, the resulting display is double-spaced. This is a display problem only, and can be corrected by clicking Edit->Restart Comparison. The application will start normally on the next invocation.
The Add View Shortcut dialog may appear to be hung if the diskette drive is disconnected, as it might be on a laptop. This dialog contains a drive letter combo box which should be filled with available drive letters, as well as the drive letter that may be already connected to the view that you chose. If a diskette drive is disconnected, it may take 10 or 15 seconds to time out. During this time the application is inaccessible.
When creating a UCM integration view, the stream it will be attached to, and any existing web views for that stream, are displayed in Internet Explorer, but not in Netscape Navigator, due to limitations of the support for dynamic HTML in Navigator 4.x.
When using a dynamic view as a merge source in the ClearCase Web interface, any elements which are checked out in that view (and need merging) cause an error during the merge. The elements should be checked in (or uncheckedout, as appropriate) in the source view before merging.
On Internet Explorer and above, deliver and rebase status is indicated by incremental updates to the status text area, the transcript, and the file listing area, as data is received from the server. Because of bugs in Netscape Navigator 4 which causes the browser to crash when partially occluded, the file listing area cannot be updated incrementally (that is, changes to checkout and merge state cannot be updated incrementally). When using the ClearCase Web interface through Netscape Navigator 4, the file listing area is updated after each major phase of the deliver/rebase request has completed.
When running the Report Builder, you must have local administrator rights on the computer to be able to create reports about the state of dynamic views. Otherwise, dynamic views do not appear in the combo box list of views when you are selecting one on which to create a report. Any snapshot views created on the local system do appear on the list, whether or not you have local administrator privileges.
The UnifiedChangeManagement package has six pre-defined public queries,
Two of the above queries are used by UCM/ClearQuest integration, UCMCustomQuery1 and MyToDoList.
In UCM1.0 and UCM2.0 Package, query MyToDoList is defined as:
Upgrading to the UCM3.0 package requires the AMStateType 1.0 package; after applying the AMStateType 1.0 package, the field ucm_statetype no longer exists (using am_statetype instead). But since the pre-defined queries in UCM 3.0 do not reflect this change, they do not perform the expected functions.
This problem is corrected in the UCM 4.0 package shipped with ClearQuest Version 2002.05.00. To correct the problem in UCM 3.0, replace occurences of ucm_statetype with am_statetype where they appear, using the same values that were associated with the previous field name. For example, the MyToDoList query should be defined as
When entering a version identifier as an Advanced version-selector in the Welcome to Merge Manager page, you must use forward slashes (/) if the Web server is running on UNIX. If the Web server is running on Windows, you may use either forward (/) or backward (\) slashes.)
When using the ClearCase Web interface on a Netscape 4 browser, use of the browser's Back button can cause unintended results in the Web user interface.
On Windows/NT, creating a symbolic link to the VOB root from a child directory works correctly but produces spurious error and warning messages:
cleartool: Error: Symbolic Link cycle detected for "vobname\child_directory\vobroot". cleartool: Error: Errors were encountered in loading "\vobname\child_directory\vobroot". cleartool: Warning: Trouble updating name "vobroot" in snapshot view: error detected by ClearCase subsystem.
The output form the command indicates that the link is successfully created and is correct.
When using the XML Diff Merge tool, if the web browser pane is visible, and the user clicks either Show All Diffs or Show All Conflicts, the web browser display goes blank. The web browser pane should be unaffected.
Workaround: Click one of the contributor panes, and the web pane is refreshed.
Some applications, for example Windows Notepad on Windows 2000, may include a Byte Order Mark (BOM) when directed to save results encoded as UTF-8. If the first three bytes of an XML file are { EF BB BF } (hex), the file is UTF-8 and the 3-byte sequence is the BOM. While a BOM is mandatory for UTF-16 files, it is optional for UTF-8 files.
The XML parser used by XML Diff Merge does not recognize the UTF-8 BOM, and instead reports a syntax error. To compare or merge such files with XML Diff Merge, one of the following workarounds may be used:
Remove the BOM (first three bytes) from the files. They will then parse and load as UTF-8
Compare or Merge using the text Diff Merge tool (to do so, use the button for this in the XML Diff Merge Parse Error dialog).
Convert the XML data to another encoding, for example, UTF-16 (in which the BOM is recognized), or ISO-8859-1 (for which it is not used).
Table 1.1 lists significant problems in previous ClearCase LT releases that are fixed in this release.
Table 1.1. ClearCase LT Problems Fixed in This Release
Table 1.2 lists the status of problems reported in previous releases.
Table 1.2. Disposition of Problems in Previous ClearCase LT Releases