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

[Ron Mitchell]

Hi all
you may have seen on the community site yet another report of lost work? I'm not sure what installation the user (Susie) is using but I just asked the following questions:

What installation are you using - who looks after it?
What version?
Did you lose the pages after making a change?
Had you pasted any text content into any of the pages e.g. from Word?
Had you added any HTML or custom code to any of the pages?
Were you editing the LO on a slow connection or did you experience any connection problems while editing?

It seems to me this is becoming and increasing occurrence but not sure we're any closer to nailing down the cause or causes.

A student on one of the HEA projects reported this recently and responded as follows:

“No text was copied and pasted,  so I doubt there would be HTML, plus no hyper linking was included....however pages were lost, but only when working or accessing the project at my house anywhere else it 'seemed' to be fine... But I can't be too sure”

This mirrors the only consistent cause Alistair and I were able to identify e.g. he was having connectivity problems and regularly getting corrupt LO's or lost pages. Since his connectivity was fixed I don't think this has happened but I'll check. All that said I've never once had this happen to me even when on trains or using mobile connections including the same codebase or even installations as Alistair.

Even if a new solution is put in place to validate before saving etc it seems to me that there will still be high risk for all those users and installations unlikely to be able to upgrade immediately and would still be good to try to nail down the cause of this.

Has anyone been able to replicate?

How many cases do we collectively know of?

Ron

-----Original Message-----
From: xerte-dev-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk [mailto:xerte-dev-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk] On Behalf Of Smith, John
Sent: 12 May 2014 16:27
To: For Xerte technical developers
Subject: [Xerte-dev] Re: FW: Further Xerte Data Loss

AFAIK Ron they are just the characters that Word stick in when you type "word" and you get the special opening/closing quotes etc...

Regards,

John Smith | Learning Technologist
Room A251, Govan Mbeki Building | School of Health & Life Sciences | Glasgow Caledonian University Cowcaddens Road | Glasgow | G4 0BA

Please address ALL support requests to hlsblt at gcu.ac.uk where one of the School Learning Technologists will pick up the job. This will ensure that all jobs are completed as promptly as possible.
________________________________________
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: 12 May 2014 16:13
To: 'For Xerte technical developers'
Subject: [Xerte-dev] Re: FW: Further Xerte Data Loss

The occasions I know of it's mostly been impossible to troubleshoot due to lack of detailed info or too late data already lost.

Alistair had regular problems and while we were trying to nail it down (over weeks) too many inconsistencies e.g. different projects, some apparently no copy and paste involved but only seemed to happen with dodgy connection.

The reason I mentioned nested pages is that seems to be common whenever this has happened but may just be coincidental.

I've also seen those ‘ characters before but I've seen broken xml without any of that and I think I've seen working LO's which haven't broken and yet had those chars.

Is there a way of reliably generating those sorts of chars to past in to prove these are the cause?

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 15:47
To: For Xerte technical developers
Subject: [Xerte-dev] Re: FW: Further Xerte Data Loss


1.      Possibly. He is remote to Nottingham, though has a Nottingham username.

2.      That doesn’t trip any switches with me – what are you thinking?

Since I found non-UTF chars in the file, I have a strong suspicion that that is the cause: even though he is pasting into notepad from word (most of the time), some are getting through. I have suggested actually saving the file in notepad as UTF 8 to force it to happen.

But this is something I would really like to see fixed. Pasting from word is a fact of life unfortunately.

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 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> [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<mailto: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).



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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This message and any attachment are intended solely for the addressee and may contain confidential information. If you have received this message in error, please send it back to me, and immediately delete it.   Please do not use, copy or disclose the information contained in this message or in any attachment.  Any views or opinions expressed by the author of this email do not necessarily reflect the views of the University of Nottingham.

This message has been checked for viruses but the contents of an attachment may still contain software viruses which could damage your computer system, you are advised to perform your own checks. Email communications with the University of Nottingham may be monitored as permitted by UK legislation.



This message and any attachment are intended solely for the addressee and may contain confidential information. If you have received this message in error, please send it back to me, and immediately delete it.   Please do not use, copy or disclose the information contained in this message or in any attachment.  Any views or opinions expressed by the author of this email do not necessarily reflect the views of the University of Nottingham.

This message has been checked for viruses but the contents of an attachment may still contain software viruses which could damage your computer system, you are advised to perform your own checks. Email communications with the University of Nottingham may be monitored as permitted by UK legislation.


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This message and any attachment are intended solely for the addressee and may contain confidential information. If you have received this message in error, please send it back to me, and immediately delete it.   Please do not use, copy or disclose the information contained in this message or in any attachment.  Any views or opinions expressed by the author of this email do not necessarily reflect the views of the University of Nottingham.

This message has been checked for viruses but the contents of an attachment may still contain software viruses which could damage your computer system, you are advised to perform your own checks. Email communications with the University of Nottingham may be monitored as permitted by UK legislation.