Other troubleshooting

Description

How to fix other miscellaneous problems with or concerning Plone

Introduction

This document contains information regarding how to fix other problems that may arise through the usage of Plone.

Hyperlinks to authenticated Plone content in Microsoft Office

Microsoft Office applications (in the first instance Word and Excel), have been observed to attempt to resolve hyperlinks once clicked, prior to sending the hyperlink to the user's browser. So, if such a link points to some Plone content that requires authentication, the Office application will request the URL first, and receive a 302 Redirect to the require_login Python script on the relevant Plone instance. So, if your original hyperlink was like so:

http://example.com/myfolder/mycontent

and this URL requires authentication, then the Office application will send your browser to this URL:

http://example.com/acl_users/credentials_cookie_auth/require_login?came_from=http%3A//example.com/myfolder/mycontent

Normally, this isn't a problem if a user is logged out at the time. They will be presented with the relevant login form and upon login, they will be redirected accordingly to the came_from= URL.

However, if the user is already logged in on the site, visiting this URL will result in an Insufficient Privileges page being displayed. This is to be expected of Plone (as this URL is normally only reached if the given user has no access), but because of Microsoft Office's mangling of the URL, may not necessarily be correct as the user may indeed have access.

The following drop-in replacement for the require_login script has been tested in Plone 4.1.3 (YMMV). Upon a request coming into this script, it attempts (a hack) to traverse to the given path. If permission is actually allowed, Plone redirects the user back to the content. Otherwise, things proceed normally and the user has no access (and is shown the appropriate message):

## Script (Python) "require_login"
##bind container=container
##bind context=context
##bind namespace=
##bind script=script
##bind subpath=traverse_subpath
##parameters=
##title=Login
##

login = 'login'

portal = context.portal_url.getPortalObject()
# if cookie crumbler did a traverse instead of a redirect,
# this would be the way to get the value of came_from
#url = portal.getCurrentUrl()
#context.REQUEST.set('came_from', url)

if context.portal_membership.isAnonymousUser():
    return portal.restrictedTraverse(login)()
else:
    expected_location = context.REQUEST.get('came_from')
    try:
        #XXX Attempt a traverse to the given path
        portal.restrictedTraverse(expected_location.replace(portal.absolute_url()+'/',''))
        container.REQUEST.RESPONSE.redirect(expected_location)
    except:
        return portal.restrictedTraverse('insufficient_privileges')()

For further reading see:

• http://plone.293351.n2.nabble.com/Linking-to-private-page-from-MS-Word-redirect-to-login-form-td5495131.html
• http://plone.293351.n2.nabble.com/Problem-with-links-to-files-stored-in-Plone-td3055014.html
• http://bytes.com/topic/asp-classic/answers/596062-hyperlinks-microsoft-applications-access-word-excel-etc
• https://community.jivesoftware.com/docs/DOC-32157

Why does folder_listing not list my contents?

The site search settings (Site Setup--> Search) modifies the way folder_listing works.

So for example, if you specifify that you do not want to search objects of type Page, they will not appear in folder_listing anymore.

From this thread.