[Erw-devel] Usage of ertool --forms

[erw-devel]

Hi, 
I am having some trouble with the new form customisation in ERW 0.9.8b 
(downloaded & installed on 16/june). ertool --forms doesn't seem to work and 
I'll use the example library.xml to explain.

I have /var/www/erw/library/ which contains directories defs, defs/custom and 
defs/forms. The library.xml is sitting in the defs directory while I use  
ertool.  

I've successfully created book.erf (file is attached to this email), 
person.erf,etc in my defs/forms directory as follows:
cd defs/forms
ertool --default-forms < ../library.xml

Then I am have trouble generating the form .php files even before customising 
any of the default .erf files and I would like you to confirm the --forms 
syntax.

I tried the following commands but they seem to never finish executing and 
don't create book.php as I expected. Note --default-forms takes only 1-2secs 
to run but --forms book doesn't finish after minutes, if at all.
ertool --forms book
ertool --forms book.erf
ertool --forms book.php
ertool --forms book person subscriber

So some further syntax attempts, but these fail with errors:
ertool --forms book < ../library.xml
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.StringIndexOutOfBoundsException: String 
index out of range: -1
        at java.lang.String.substring(String.java:1480)
        at it.unimi.dsi.erw.FormsBackend.go(FormsBackend.java:240)
        at it.unimi.dsi.erw.ERtool.main(ERtool.java:371)

ertool --forms < book.erf
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NullPointerException
        at it.unimi.dsi.erw.ERtool.process(ERtool.java:91)
        at it.unimi.dsi.erw.ERtool.main(ERtool.java:325)

What is the correct syntax for usage of ertool --forms ?
Can you suggest any methods for troubleshooting of the above ertool --forms 
problem?

For your interest, an excerpt from ps aux while "ertool --forms book" is 
still running:
USER       PID %CPU %MEM   VSZ  RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND
root     32422  0.0  0.3  2112  940 pts/1    S    19:37   0:00 /bin/bash 
/usr/sbin/ertool --forms book
root     32423  2.9  4.0 204848 10448 pts/1  S    19:37   0:01 
/usr/local/java.sun/java.current/bin/java 
-Dit.unimi.dsi.erw.dtddir=/usr/local/share/ERW/erl it.unimi.dsi.erw.ERtool 
--forms book
root     32424  0.0  4.0 204848 10448 pts/1  S    19:37   0:00 
/usr/local/java.sun/java.current/bin/java 
-Dit.unimi.dsi.erw.dtddir=/usr/local/share/ERW/erl it.unimi.dsi.erw.ERtool 
--forms book
etc, there are 9 of these processes.

book.erf
Description: Text Data