[Xerte-dev] Re: FW: Further Xerte Data Loss

Mon May 12 15:56:51 BST 2014

Note: there has obviously been lots of subsequent discussion but my replies
below were sent at 12:33 and seemed to reach the list at 15:45! :-(

From: xerte-dev-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk
[mailto:xerte-dev-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk] On Behalf Of Ron Mitchell
Sent: 12 May 2014 12:48
To: 'For Xerte technical developers'
Subject: [Xerte-dev] Re: FW: Further Xerte Data Loss

Very frustrating replying and seeing loads of other replies sent after mine
hitting the list before my reply even reaches! :-(

But anyway just re-reading the message from you user and I wonder.

1. Any likelihood of connection problems being the cause?

2. Wondering if rather than connectors or tab nav whether the problem only
occurs with page types that have nested pages?

From: Ron Mitchell [mailto:ronm at mitchellmedia.co.uk] 
Sent: 12 May 2014 12:33
To: 'For Xerte technical developers'
Subject: RE: [Xerte-dev] FW: Further Xerte Data Loss

I think the fact that it's a connector page in this case might be a red
herring. I previously thought it was to do with the tabnav page types but
that may be a red herring too.

Yes I've had reports of this quite a few times now (different installations)
but haven't been able to nail it down or reliably replicate it except that
in Alistairs case it was dodgy connection and so possibly packet loss.

The advice I've been giving is pasted below but I agree it's worrying
whenever this happens even though I haven't ever been able to make it happen
myself.

Sorry not much help I guess :-(

Guidance example given to one of the HEA projects:

I think you need to provide some guidance to the students to be very careful
when authoring if any connection problems are noticed. Also be careful when
copying and pasting text into xerte pages or writing code/html. Lost or
corrupted pages with xerte are very rare but the occurrences we do know
about either happen due to poor connectivity or to code/tags breaking the
xml. The key message is do not click publish if any problems are noticed
because preview saves the latest changes to preview.xml but these changes
are not written to data.xml until publish is selected. So if a problem is
noticed not clicking publish can sometimes mean that we can recover from
data.xml even if preview.xml has been broken.

From: xerte-dev-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk
[mailto:xerte-dev-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk] On Behalf Of Julian Tenney
Sent: 12 May 2014 12:08
To: For Xerte technical developers (xerte-dev at lists.nottingham.ac.uk)
Subject: [Xerte-dev] FW: Further Xerte Data Loss

I guys, I need to get to the bottom of this issue: I have a fairly advanced
user who has been periodically losing data: the email below explains the
problem. A couple of weeks ago it happened and we lost 40 slides, now it has
happened again. In the file I looked at, the broken file ended with the
characters

<cMen

i.e. an incomplete tag, which I believe should be <cMenuConnector
params="etc">

Does this ring any bells with anyone? Anyone experienced it before
elsewhere? I don't think the menu connectors are used much, which is why we
haven't come across it before?

I have a feeling it is something to do with escaping characters as data is
being saved, or as it is being read back to the editor. Anyone have any
other bright ideas how we can troubleshoot it? See below.

Thanks a lot,

Julian 

I've experienced further data loss again this morning, this time on a
completely different Xerte project (
<http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/toolkits/play_10189>
http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/toolkits/play_10189). 

I initially produced this resource using the Flash Xerte engine, but the
academic I'm working with was keen for me to transfer the data over into
HTML5. I made a direct duplicate copy of the Flash project, ticked the HTML5
engine and then set about reproducing the slides - no problem.

Everything was absolutely fine (after working on the project for most of
Friday) until around 10:30am this morning, when I lost around 10-15 slides
(including my review quiz with 20 MCQs). I'm now beginning to strongly
suspect that the Xerte Menu Connector templates might be having something to
do with this persistent problem? 

I have been using multiple connector menus in both my Grasslands and Meat
Science packages. In both I have a dominant 'Main Menu' at the start, which
then 'connects' via tabs to several sub-menus (of the same Connector
template type) dotted throughout the resource. In each of the sub-menus I
link back to the Main Menu.

My last actions before the slides were lost today, happened after I included
a further sub-menu connector (at around slide 70) and then linked this to
this from the 'Main Menu' (slide 2) via the drop-down selector menu. I then
published the changes. 

With that being said, I've attempted to recreate the problem using a dummy
file, but I have so far failed to do it.

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