Rails Complex nested form - random issue

I know this is a complete long shot, but I thought I would give it a try. I have an issue when submitting an extremely large nested form to the update action. This issue is completely random, and when it happens I can not get it to reoccur even using the same dataset from when it happened.

When the issue happens it seems that the parameters submitted back to the server are truncated and I loose half of them. I have been trying for the past 3 weeks to get to the bottom of it with no luck. I am wondering if anyone has some different ideas on how I could debug this. From the work that I have done so far I can safely say that once the parameters are in the controller action they are messed up. This leads me to believe that either the form itself is randomly not being rendered correctly to the browser (the edit call) and therefor submitting back the incorrect parameters, or something is going wrong with the submit call causing the parameters to be messed up.

Is there a way I can log what the render command is sending back to the browser, and as well, the parameters that are getting submitted back from the browser to the server before it hits the rails stack (to see if it actually the browser causing the issue).

Im open to any client side tools/firefox plugins. I have attempted to use selenium within firefox, but I am going to try and play with that some more.

Any help or further questions are really appreciated.

Thanks!

Ryan Lundie

The form is doing a post request. I also have multi-part set to true on the form because the use has the option of uploading a file with it. I have about 5 users on the system at all times, and this issue only happens at most once a day, so I can not easily reproduce it. Is there a way/plugin to always log what the browser is rendering and returning in the post?As for the size of the form it varies. It is fairly large though. Is there a limit on a post request?

lundie 2009-12-30 15:25:13

There's already a log of the entire post request. Depending on your environment, of course it's in `RAILS_ROOT/log/environment.log`

thenduks 2009-12-30 16:34:01

Also, what did firebug reveal about the rendering of the form?

thenduks 2009-12-30 16:34:39

The problem is that I can't reproduce it. It's happening in production, and very randomly. Is there a way for me to run firebug on my users machines and have it log each request to a text file? The environment.log just shows that half the parameters are not submitted back when the error occurs. Here is an example of how bizarre this is. I created a clone of my production environment this morning and ran both side by side. Just 20 minutes ago the error happened for on of my users. I then went in to edit the same form on the other server, with the same info, and it worked fine.

lundie 2009-12-30 16:51:26

Yea... as with any problem like this it's practically impossible to diagnose (let alone fix) a problem you can't reproduce. Find out everything you can about the user's machine who had the problem, maybe they're using IE or something?... You really need to repro this yourself to make any progress.

thenduks 2009-12-30 17:21:50

I don't believe that it is a particular parameter. When the error occurs it is more than half of the parameters missing (according to the rails logs). The extremely strange part of the issue is that I can make a full database backup. Have the error occur on a particular form, restore the database and edit the same form and the error does not occur. What I need to do is narrow the issue down to either the rendering of the form, or the submitting back of the form.

lundie 2009-12-30 15:47:56

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Rails Complex nested form - random issue

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