Question

The question relates specifically to this website. It is relevant to any Add-On which is written as a Firefox extension.

The FirefoxExtensionAddOn is hosted here. I have written an update.rdf file for it, which works fine when Firefox reads it as a local file from my computer, but doesn't work when Firefox tries to download it from this site. I suspect that the trouble may be that your web server does not have the correct MIME type defined. Firefox updates won't work properly unless the following is defined:

MIME type: text/xml
Extension: rdf

For more info (if required) see, for example: http://roachfiend.com/archives/2005/03/09/enabling-extension-updates http://jedbrown.net/1.0/mozilla/EM

Please could you check whether your web server has this MIME type definition, and if not, add it.

Thanks

-- NigelGreen - 20 Jul 2005

Environment

-- NigelGreen - 20 Jul 2005

Answer

If you answer a question - or someone answered one of your questions - please remember to edit the page and set the status to answered. The status selector is below the edit box.

I added text/xml rdf to the mime.types file. Let me know if this does not solve the issue.

-- PeterThoeny - 21 Jul 2005

please let me know if this worked, as i will then add it to mime.types in the twiki source code. thanks

-- WillNorris - 24 Jul 2005

It hasn't worked yet, though unless the documentation is very misleading, it is a pre-requisite for making the update function work.

There are some persistent error messages which pop out when the extension is installed, which might perhaps affect the update function, but this seems unlikely, as

1. the message when the update fails states that either the server did not respond, or the update services were not found;
2. the update function works OK when the update.rdf file is read from the local disk.

However, I will double-check that there is not a coding error at my end.

One of the references I gave in the original question suggests text/rdf as an alternative to text/xml. This might be worth trying.

-- NigelGreen - 24 Jul 2005

I removed the text/xml rdf setting and added the following settings to TWiki.org's mime.types file, aligning it with the settings of Apache 2's default settings:

application/rdf+xml             rdf
application/xhtml+xml           xhtml xht
application/xslt+xml            xslt
application/xml                 xml xsl
application/xml-dtd             dtd

Could you check if this works?

-- PeterThoeny - 24 Jul 2005

Unfortunately, no. However, I have now tested the update.rdf file on a Netscape web server, using the original text/xml MIME type, and it worked fine. Would it be possible for you to temporarily make available a non-TWiki directory on your web server, which I could load the update.rdf file into for further testing? This would simplify the problem by eliminating any possible troublesome interaction between TWiki and firefox, and allow me to verify whether the MIME types that you have defined are suitable (as I expect they are).

-- NigelGreen - 09 Sep 2005

You can attach the rdf file to this topic for testing. TWiki shows a static link to the attached file, e.g. the download of an rdf file is handled by Apache without TWiki.

You can send me the same file by e-mail, I can verify if the uploaded file is identical.

-- PeterThoeny - 09 Sep 2005

It seems to follow that the problem must be with Apache, not TWiki, so I have tested the mechanism on an Apache server, using a .htaccess file in the same directory as the update.rdf file. The result was that the second batch of MIME types, i.e. application/rdf+xml, etc, didn't help, but the mechanism worked OK with text/xml rdf. So the puzzle is, why didn't it work on this site? I think the problem may have been that the Firefox cache interfered with the test. So if you would reinstate the text/xml rdf MIME type, which seems to be essential, I'll retest, making sure that I empty the Firefox cache first.

-- NigelGreen - 13 Sep 2005

I changed it to text/xml rdf and asked SvenDowideit to restart Apache.

-- PeterThoeny - 14 Sep 2005

That seems to have done the trick. I tested it by installing the original 0.1 version of the extension in Firefox, then checking for and installing any available updates, and all worked perfectly. I will notify WillNorris, as requested above. Thanks very much for your help.

-- NigelGreen - 15 Sep 2005

that's ok, i read twiki.org so, we should add text/xml rdf to the mime.types file distributed with twiki, right?

-- WillNorris - 15 Sep 2005

Bugs:Item391

-- WillNorris - 15 Sep 2005