Blank project when adding iHateMoney with differing project name and ID

[Finebouche]

Hi.
First I want to say thank you for this app, this is a great idea.

However I haven't been able to make it work with my Ihatemoney project.
My version of the app is 2.3.7

If I try only with Id and password, the project seems to load but nothing shows after.
If I try to add the server address, I get the error message "Could not find server"

Any idea ?

[Hustenbonbon]

Hi, are you using the public instance or your own?

[Hustenbonbon]

And are you using special signs in your password? I'll try to reproduce it as soon as I have those infos

[Finebouche]

Hi, this is a public instance and my password has the signs $ and * in it.

[Hustenbonbon]

Hi, I couldn't reproduce it with using a $ and * in my project.

Did you check that you selected iHateMoney in the top switcher?

Otherwise, please create a project where it doesn't work for you, and then send me an email with the connection info at hustenbonbon@posteo.de, so I can check this project

[Finebouche]

OK so I tried to reproduce this with lots of projects with testnames like "test24" and so on, a few users, a bill and it was working just fine.
So then I recreated a dummy project with realistic name like "Spongebob house" and BAM, the syncing stopped working.

After a few more testing, turns out that when the name of the project contain a space, nothing sync.
So for instance "Test24" will work but not "Test 24".

[Finebouche]

Okay so after a few more testing, it appears that there is more to that than just space. If I have the name "Spongebob house" and the id "spongebob-house", it seems that it will only work if I turn the name to something like "Spongebob-house" regardless of capital letters.

Maybe there is some inversion between the project id and the project name in the code that could create that ?

[Hustenbonbon]

We lowercase the input before sending it. iHateMoney seems to transform spaces to - internally. What you need to type in in payforme is what you’ll see in the url of iHateMoney. Surely that is not intuitive, and there is no hint telling the user.
i don’t have the time currently to fix it myself, but I would be happy to accept a pull request doing the same conversion or adding a hint text

[Finebouche]

I think you missunderstood what I said.

I was entering the corrected id in the payform, the one that you see in the url.

But somehow the name of the project, the one that is shown in the list of projects, needed to contain a - as well.

So for instance if I choose to enter in the form id: spongebob-house with password: squarepants. The project will be marked as loading whatever the name is.

But the bills and users will load with:
id : spongebob-house
name: Spongebob-house

but not with :
id : spongebob-house
name: Spongebob house

[jfilter]

I have the same problem. While I can add the project to PayForMe, the data does not sync from the server. The project is blank. I also have a space in the project name on IHateMoney.

[rkowalewski]

I had the same issue quite recently.

Fix: Remove any spaces from both the project id and project name.

The app seems to have an issue with spaces in both fields.

[Hustenbonbon]

In ihatemoney (and cospend) there is a project name and project ID. End users usually don’t see the project id, but this is what is needed to use the API.
we tried to make a good workaround with qr codes, are they working for you?

the project ID is auto generated from the project name, default is the name lowercased and with dashes instead of spaces.

I’m happy to accept a pull request which automatically converts spaces to dashes and lowercases the words.
If anyone is interested, I can point to the right places in code.

[LennyPenny]

With a project on the ihatemoney.org instance I get this error:

Note that without specifying the server address I can't press the connect button at all. If I specify it get this error.
Also this error seems to break the ui as you can't try connecting again. (I guess the image + error text are obstructing the button)

My project ID is of the form: something + somethingelse, so I tried putting something-+-somethingelse to no avail.

[LennyPenny]

aah! special characters are omitted from project ids. (You can see the actual project ID in the email that gets sent to you by ihatemoney.org). I managed to connect that way. something + somethingelse -> something-somethingelse
So the could not find server error is a bit misleading, it's probably the project that can't be found.

However I can now confirm OPs findings with the official instance (project is added but neither expenses nor members are shown in the UI):