Sidecars running on InDesign CS4 SERVER Version 6 are crashing frequently.

[Guest]

The sidecars running on Indesign CS4 Version 6 are crashing frequently. What is the fix that these sidecars are stable and do not go offline

[BobLevine]

What is a sidecar?

What is your operating system?

[Guest]

Hi Bob,

Sidecars are jobs running on our InDesign Machine, these sidecars should be online all the time so that the integration between the InDesign Machine and our application is not affected.

The operating system is Mac OS X 10.9.2.

Regards,

Shravan

[BobLevine]

I'm sorry, but I still don't know what you're referring to.

[Steve Werner]

Are you using an InDesign server?

[Guest]

Yes, an indesign server with mac os x 10.9.2

[Steve Werner]

There's the rub. 99.9% of us are not using InDesign Server, and have no idea what you're talking about. There used to be an InDesign Server Developers subforum but for some reason, it was discontinued.

I'll change the title of your topic to include "InDesign Server" so any server users might be able to pick it out. We get a very high volume of questions on this forum, and almost none about InDesign Server.

[Laubender]

Ok.

FWIW: InDesign Server Developers subforum

is back.

Bob,

I think that sidecars are lists of tasks for processing things in a distinctive order automatically or inject data while processing.

We had sidecar.xml with DPS publishing about 5 years ago. Johannes Hänseler did a sidecar generator back then.

You could fill out the "form" in advance and InDesign would use the data to build the necessary folio files in a particular order with the meta data an all that.

A sidecar xml file back then was something like that:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<sidecar>
    <!-- article #1 -->
    <entry>
        <folderName>Article One</folderName>
        <articleTitle>title</articleTitle>
        <byline>byline</byline>
        <author>author</author>
        <kicker>kicker</kicker>
        <description>description</description>
        <tags>tag1, tag2</tags>
        <isAd>false</isAd>
        <hideFromTOC>true</hideFromTOC>
        <smoothScrolling>never</smoothScrolling>
        <isFlattenedStack>false</isFlattenedStack>
    </entry>
    <!-- article #2 -->

Sorry, I disgressed.

That would not help the OP with his problem.

For that I have really no clue.

Regards,
Uwe

[BobLevine]

I remember sidecars for DPS very well, but that still doesn't clarify what was happening here.

[Dirk Becker]

Sorry for the late reply, I did not know this channel was revived.

When CS4 IDS was still covered by "platinum" support packages around 2011 or 2012, there were some bugfix versions available thru special channels (e.g. higher level of tech and solution partner programs). For example it took me about a month's worth of work in a longer period of time to nail down a crashing bug of the soap library, convince Adobe support that it was their code and so forth until I finally got it resolved.

That kind of support has long been discontinued and the matching archives went offline past year. You are now supposed to update to recent CC versions, otherwise you are on your own: even if you know your way around in assembler code debugging it may take weeks to eventually write a plugin that replaces the faulty code.

Edit: of course instead of getting the bug fixed I would first attempt to work around, e.g. first check crash dumps if the culprit really is that sidecar logic (I did not even know about it), then it may be easier to reimplement it in whole or use other approaches.