Right now, elisa claims the well-known dbus name 'com.fluendo.Elisa' early on, in each plugin that uses dbus. It should only claim the name when the database is initialized.
This bug can be seen if you try to activate elisa via dbus (so elisa isn't running, you send dbus command, dbus starts elisa, elisa claims bus, dbus sends request to elisa). If elisa claims the bus too early, it may not be ready for the command and it will fail.
I'm attaching a patch that fixes this (I believe). I *think* that interface_initialized is the right place to put the dbus name grab.
To test, run the following command without elisa running:
dbus-send --print-reply --dest=com.fluendo.Elisa /com/fluendo/Elisa/Plugins/Database/Photo com.fluendo.Elisa.Plugins.Database.Photo.get_albums int32:0 int32:10
This should print a list of all your photo albums.
I can't reproduce here, all I get is:
Error org.freedesktop
Anyway it would make sense to claim the bus name only once and store, maybe as an attribute of the application.
I can see one issue in claiming the bus name late: detecting whether an instance of Moovida is already running relies on dbus.