Request for help: Intermittent bug in Struts app

[Troy Davis <troy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi All,

I'm trying to debug an intermittent issue that's happening with a java 
web app written by another programmer for my company, and I'd greatly 
appreciate any advice you can offer.

The application is built on Struts 1.2.4, running on Tomcat 4.1.30. One 
part of the app keeps track of a list of articles in a database, one 
table is used to keep track of which order the articles should appear 
on each page. So when a user creates or edits an article, the 
moveItemDown or moveItemUp method is called, which relies on 
Collections.swap to do the reordering. It deletes entries from the 
database for the section of the site that the article appears in, then 
inserts new entries that reflect the desired order.

Most of the time this works just fine. But sometimes after the delete 
statement is executed on the database, no insert statements follow. 
Initially I thought it could be a session timeout condition, so I put a 
session.isNew check in the JSP files to eliminate this possibility. 
Unfortunately, it didn't stop the next occurrence of this problem.

It's probably also relevant to note that the text for the article gets 
inserted into the database properly, and any images are uploaded to the 
server as expected. But either the appropriate reordering method isn't 
getting called, or it silently skips the insert step. The logs from 
MySQL have been helpful in this regard, they show that most article 
creation and edit requests are inserting the article content, then 
deleting the order entries, then inserting the new order entries. When 
the error happens, it just doesn't insert the order entries.

I haven't found a way to reproduce the problem, which is very annoying. 
And of course there are no unit tests for this app. Can anyone offer a 
suggestion on how to track down the issue?

TIA,
Troy

__________________
Troy Davis
Technology Director
Metaphor Studio
538 Reading Road
Loft 200
Cincinnati, Ohio 45202

Tel: 513-723-0290
Fax: 513-723-0670
http://metaphorstudio.com