This patch includes some fixes to DASH 3.4.4. It must not be installed to any earlier DASH release.

If DASH 3.4.4 has not been installed yet or you wish to do a clean install then a complete updated package is available.

• Fixed potential race condition in server, where a test/revise/recode user could conceivably access the same case as an interviewer, at the same time. In practice a "Case in use" message was displayed. However the potential race condition is now entirely removed to be safe.
• The DASH3 server and utilities now lock the case to prevent concurrent access when writing to case files. Previously an auto-recode, case delete or data load external utility could overwrite interviewer case data in a rare race condition. If a data write utility finds a case locked it will report an error and terminate without writing to that case. All cases prior to the locked case are written correctly and no case after the locked case is written to.
• The case data file history scan now resynchronizes and steps around a data file overwrite problem caused by the above mentioned race conditions.
• Apostrophes are now allowed in alpha fields in XUL. A bug prevented them from displaying in CATI mode (for example when "don't" was entered into an alpha field).
• Added 'http-referer' use field to DASH so that logging and/or logic can be performed based on the origin of a web respondent.
• Removed DASH form editor from menu. OpenOffice 1.x is the preferred editor for DASH 3 forms. A new form editor will be available in the coming months.
• Fixed grepLookup so that only exact matches of keys are returned. Previously if key "123" was searched for in a file, then "0123", "1234", and "01234" would all match.
• Update DASH2 applet run scripts to work on operating systems (Suse) that didn't define required environment variables on system startup.
• The tables post execute command file "dashtable.tcl" had a few naming errors.
• End notes in Open Office documents caused conversion errors. End note styles are now stripped from the Open Office document to prevent errors. Other error messages complaining about "master_style", if any, will also be rectified by this fix.
• Some of the system applications (Supervisor menu, System Administration menu) had invalid CSS styles font-size="...". This has been corrected to font-size: ...; so that spurious Javascript error messages are not produced when running these applications.
• Dump Form Data now outputs a blank as default (instead of "/NL/") for new lines embedded in text block fields. The "-newlines" option may still be used from the command line to output alternate strings for the text field new lines.
• View Case Data now dumps the case data to the screen correctly when a text field has embedded new lines .
• A file /usr/local/dash3/java/VERSION is now included in the patch and distribution to allow tracking of the installed version and patch level.
• The supervisor menu quota modification page did not display the correct quota if the quota display base was not set to the first quota.
• The data file history access has been speeded up by more than a factor of 2 by applying the case range check before reading the case data from the history record.
• The "html" and "xul" fields had a bug that prevented ampersand (&) from being output. This has been fixed. The bug prevented Asian and Eastern European characters from being displayed (such as 谢).
• Tables did not recognize the "statistic-decimals" format inside the <formats > section of a tables XML specification, which can be used to control the number of decimal places displayed for means, standard deviations, and so on. This has been fixed.
• If an interviewer allocated case is found to be locked in use it is now returned to the correct queue instead of remaining on the active queue.
• The administrator menu now adds scroll bars automatically for pages that overflow the view area.
• DASH 2 "Copy Pages to Form" did not update the internal store for the maximum page number if the page was copied past the end of the form. This caused a problem in export markup which used the internal maximum page number to determine pages to export.