This is a follow up message to summarise what happened next.
Daniel was kind enough to send us a couple of examples of the source files that he couldn't upload. Unfortunately I couldn't replicate the problem, neither in the test environment nor on the live application. This led to the conclusion that it is likely that the problem has something to do with the connection speed, in particular, the upload speed, that is frequently limited for home broadband connections.
Naturally, we want EPPI-Reviewer to perform well, regardless to the connection speed, so I've tried to optimise the references upload mechanism and found one single improvement that might speed up the final importing step (what happens after clicking on "Upload Items"). I believe this will make uploads faster and more reliable when operating over a slow connection.
However, the only way to permanently remove this type of problem would be to re-write the importing mechanism from scratch, something that will require much more time.
Should anybody experience similar problems, please proceed as follows:
- Try uploading smaller files (in the order of one- or two-hundred references per import). If smaller files are uploaded correctly, it is likely that you are dealing with a slow connection problem.
- Let us know about your issue, even if using smaller files does solve the problem.
It is important for us to know what problems you might experience: in this particular case we will know that re-writing the import mechanism should become a priority.
A side note: the most recent versions of Firefox do not like the way some of the EPPI-Reviewer error messages are shown. The result is that Firefox might crash when an error is not quickly dismissed (by clicking "OK"). It is possible to disable the Firefox feature (ironically called "crash protection") that causes this behaviour: please follow this link to learn how. You don't have to disable this feature for all supported plugins, in case you wish to disable crash protection only for Silverlight (recommended) you can do the following (adapted from the link above):
1.Open Firefox, type about:config in the URL box and click "I’ll be careful , I promise"
2.Search for ipc in Filter box .
3.Double click on the following two entries to set their values to false.
dom.ipc.plugins.enabled
dom.ipc.plugins.enabled.npctrl.dll
4.Restart Firefox .That’s it, "plugin–container/crash protection" is disabled for Silverlight applications only.
Best wishes,
Sergio
-- EPPI-Reviewer support team --