Project Draw User Consolidated Login and Google Gears

Autodesk Labs Software Engineer, David Falck, shared a story regarding some Project Draw feedback from Amsterdam.

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The Project Draw (http://draw.labs.autodesk.com) users were migrated successfully during last weekend's consolidated login deployment. The percentage of users whose diagrams were migrated successfully was 97.6%! Of those accounts that did not get migrated, it appears most fall into the following categories:

• Abandoned accounts - a user saved diagrams to the Project Draw server in the past, but hasn't logged into labs.autodesk.com in more than 6 months.
• "Victims" - approximately 45 accounts were "victims" of the consolidated login implementation. Don't worry; it's not as bad as it sounds. It just means that the users had more than one labs.autodesk.com account, and they saved diagrams in a directory owned by an account that was not migrated. If you find yourself in this situation, let us know at [email protected], and we'll move your diagrams to the correct account.
• API accounts - these are folders of diagrams used by Draw API users.
• Dave's test accounts - it takes a massive authentication system replacement project to make Dave realize how many test accounts he really had on the Project Draw server. :-)

A few days ago, a really interesting (and unanticipated) issue was brought to our team's attention. One of our loyal users in Amsterdam took Project Draw (version 0.7.6) offline using Google Gears last Friday just before our big migration. When he tried to go back online on Tuesday, the Gears cache was incompatible with the latest version of Project Draw (version 0.7.7.CL) which takes advantage of the new authentication system. This issue can be resolved by clearing your Google Gears cache and refreshing your browser while using Project Draw. If you've gone offline before the migration and need to synch up with the latest release of Project Draw, here's how you can do it:

1. Click on the ONLINE button in the Draw toolbar - you should be prompted to enter your username/pwd if you're not already logged in.
   

2. If that doesn't work, you can clear the Google Gears cache. This can be done by going IE's Tools menu and clicking on Gears Settings. You can do the same thing in Firefox too.
   

3. Once you click on Gears Settings, you should see this:
   

4. Click on the "Remove" link and then the "Apply" button.

5. On your keyboard, hit F5 to refresh the browser. You should then see this:
   

6. Check the checkbox to allow Project Draw to use Gears, then hit "Allow" button.

7. If this doesn't work, you can always uninstall Google Gears from your machine, reinstall it, and then visit the Project Draw site once more.

Just to reiterate - no diagrams were harmed in the migration to the new login system! We have several copies of the Project Draw database and file system from pre-migration, so if you have any issues whatsoever, please let us know at [email protected]. We'll work to make sure you get your diagrams back as soon as possible.

Being grateful that consolidated login migration was successful is alive in the labs.

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Thanks David.