[Xerte-dev] Re: Lost Data

Julian Tenney Julian.Tenney at nottingham.ac.uk
Wed Feb 5 23:03:34 GMT 2014


I thoght what would be good to do would be to write out a backup every time the file is saved, then you'd be able to see, but managing that sensibly is a bit tricky? tIt would need to clean up, and leave, maybe, the last 30 saves?

It might be something that happens only with a new editing session? So it might be the way the wizard reads the xml in.
________________________________________
From: xerte-dev-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk [xerte-dev-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk] On Behalf Of Ron Mitchell [ronm at mitchellmedia.co.uk]
Sent: 05 February 2014 16:56
To: 'For Xerte technical developers'
Subject: [Xerte-dev] Re: Lost Data

The problem also is that it's not 100% clear if this happens only after the change that caused the break. So even if we got hold of a restored backup it probably wouldn't help.

At some point but probably not until middle of next week I'm going to see if I can automate my own local back up of the user-files folders on one or two of the Techdis installations. At the moment the backups are off-server and I don't have access. If I can automate local backups at least I can quickly get to the working xml as soon as someone reports this.

Cheers
Ron

From: xerte-dev-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk [mailto:xerte-dev-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk] On Behalf Of Julian Tenney
Sent: 05 February 2014 16:16
To: For Xerte technical developers
Subject: [Xerte-dev] Re: Lost Data

No idea. In the case here the html was all escaped in CDATA, being part of the main page text – I wrote it to do some custom stuff, which involved adding a custom button to each page to display a transcript for narration and a couple of other things. Once I’d sorted it out, I made a prototype and gave it to the author to duplicate, with a set of pages set up to duplicate so she could crack on with the content quickly. I didn’t experience any problems myself.

I suspect in both cases, the user has limited html skills. They could easily have left a tag unclosed, or an attribute without a quote, the sort of thing that I’m (a bit) less likely to do.

From: xerte-dev-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk<mailto:xerte-dev-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk> [mailto:xerte-dev-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk] On Behalf Of Smith, John
Sent: 05 February 2014 16:10
To: For Xerte technical developers
Subject: [Xerte-dev] Re: Lost Data

Hi,

I suspect that the custom HTML is your best link to reproducing this… something in there has probably caused the nodes not to load properly into the Flash editor and then when it was written back out those nodes were then overwritten. This is the problem with mixing XML and HTML, unless its properly wrapped in CDATA blocks.

Do you have any clue as to what was in the HTML?

Regards,

John Smith
Learning Technologist
School of Health & Life Sciences
Glasgow Caledonian University

From: xerte-dev-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk<mailto:xerte-dev-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk> [mailto:xerte-dev-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk] On Behalf Of Julian Tenney
Sent: Wednesday, February 05, 2014 3:59 PM
To: For Xerte technical developers (xerte-dev at lists.nottingham.ac.uk<mailto:xerte-dev at lists.nottingham.ac.uk>)
Subject: [Xerte-dev] Lost Data

Hi,

Just wondering if anyone else has experienced the same data loss we had here last week, and that was reported on the Xerte list yesterday. In both cases, the user reported ‘lost pages’. Looking at the xml it was intact, with a closing </learningObject> tag: that’s the first time I’ve ever seen data loss with a valid xml file left over (I would expect it to truncate at the point the file broke, and safety code should stop that then saving, right?)

Maybe it’s just coincidence, but I’m a bit worried there might be a problem we don’t know about causing data to get lost. In the case reported here, I don’t suspect (highly) user error (it’s always a possibility). In the case on the Xerte list I’m less certain. I’ve asked for more info, but none has been forthcoming.

Obviously we need to try and reproduce it if possible, or put in place some sort of safety mechanism. I did notice that both had some custom HTML going on in the code. Any ideas or insight?

Julian


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