Users favorites are not available or outdated in the DOORS Client

Resolving The Problem

With the favorites list for a particular user missing or outdated the first step is to identify the exact location of the relevant file in the DOORS database file system structure.

• You will need DXL powers in DOORS and access to the DOORS data folder in order to run this analysis.
  
  
• Once you identified the current favorites file, you can ask your server administrators to restore the corresponding file from the backups immediately prior to the loss of the favorites.
  
  
• You can also use the steps below to view and confirm the file in the backup archive contains the favorites your user is missing. If it doesn't, then restoring it will be of no value.
  
  
• Shutdown the DOORS server as you cannot replace any files on your DOORS database. You may need to wait for a maintenance window to do that.
  
  
• If your user has stored new favorites in the meanwhile, restoring the backup will overwrite these changes. They may want to make a note of their new favorites and add them once everything is back in order again.

The details for each user (if they have saved any items to Favorites)are saved in the "DOORS DB Server data directory\conf" directory.

Also for each user, a unique folder would be created within the conf folder within which the details would be stored.

Hence, if you want to identify favorites for a specific user, you would have to first identify the unique id of that user and then find out the corresponding folder in the conf directory.

Note: Its recommended that you ONLY use this for reading information and NOT do any manual modifications as this may lead to corruption of user related information.

1. Identify the unique ID of a specific user:
1. Log in as Administrator account in DOORS
2. Edit the DXL from the DB Explorer Tools > Edit DXL
3. Copy paste this code and replace the name TEST with their affected user's username value:
   
   
User u = find "TEST"
string s = u.identifier
print s

   
   This would produce an output similar to "0000000000000002" depending on the id assigned to that user.
   
   
2. Identifying the corresponding user folder in conf directory
1. Log in to the machine where the DOORS DB Server data directory resides
2. Navigate to the data directory "conf" folder.
   (example: C:\Program Files (x86)\IBM\Rational\DOORS\9.6\data\conf)
3. In the conf folder, you will notice a file named userdirs.idx"
4. Open the file in a text editor. For example notepad
   
   NOTE: Make sure that there are NO manual modifications done in this file and the contents are only viewed and nothing should be changed.
5. Search for the value that you had got by running the DXL in step 1. (in our example: 0000000000000002).
   You will notice that there would be a entry named similar to "u1000003.dir" when the unique ID is searched.
   This is the name of the folder which resides in the conf directory and corresponds to the user which had been searched in DOORS.
6. Close the file.
   
   
3. Navigate to the .dir folder identified as above ("u1000003.dir" in our example) and within which there should be a text file named
   "favorites+AF8-ext.txt".
1. When this file is opened via a text editor, you will notice the names and unique ID's of all items that this user has saved as favorites in DOORS.

NOTE: Make sure that there are NO manual modifications done in this file and the contents are only viewed and nothing should be changed.


4. Close the file.
   
   

When restoring the favorites from backup, apply the same steps to identify the relevant file in your backup file system structure. Use the above steps to review the favorites and confirm with your user, that what you see is what they expect to be restored.

Be sure to shutdown the DOORS server before replacing ANY files in the DOORS Server Data Folder!