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10/11/2010 17:14
 

I have imported a large number of resources into EPPI Reviewer 4 (over 7000), but everytime I try to upload them, my Silverlight plug-in crashes.  I have checked that I have an up-to-date plug in.  Does anybody have any explanations as to why this might be happening? 

 
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11/11/2010 09:50
 

Dear Daniel,

thank you fro trying EPPI-Reviewer, I am sorry to hear that you are experiencing some problems.

I have written the import page and haven't been able to see a crash in there for ages. The quickest way forward would be fro me to receive the file that's creating you some problems and try to reproduce the crash inside our testing environment. May I ask you to send the file to EPPISupport@ioe.ac.uk? If you've uncovered a bug, I might be able to write a solution in time for the update we are planning to publish early next week.

In the mean time, let's see if I've understood your problem correctly, the sequenquence of events you are experiencing would be something like:

1) you select an import filer

2) you click on "read file" and select a file with over 7000 references in it

3) the list of references does appear in the interface

4) when you click "Upload Items" you get a silverlight crash (are you using FireFox?).

Thanks for letting us know: we really appreciate all kind of feedback.

Best wishes,

Sergio Graziosi

-- EPPI-Reviewer support team --

 

 
New Post
12/11/2010 16:09
Accepted Answer 

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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 --

 
New Post
08/12/2010 11:28
 

I've had a similar issue (on a reasonably fast connection) - anything over 2-3,000 refs crashes, smaller files work fine

 
New Post
08/12/2010 12:01
 

Hi Theo,

I was investigating a similar case (reported privately) yesterday. It turned out to be a different issue from the original post in this thread: Daniel had a problem with source files that I couldn't replicate, neither in our test environment nor in the live versions. OTOH, in yesterday's case, I could replicate the issue, and found a similar threshold as you report. I'm still investigating why this happens: it is not clear at the moment, but the system was designed to support higer numbers of refs. Indeed, I can still import larger sources with other test files and, in the live EPPI-reviewer database, there are some sources that contain 4000+ refs.

I know it is a size issue of some sort: the amount of information that can be sent to our server is hard-coded to a maximum ot three megabytes, and I can't change this value. What makes the analysis complex is that all communication with the server is compressed, and compression efficiency is essentially umpredictable. My task is to find out why in some cases ~2000 refs eat up much more space than the expected, and possibly implement some kind of countermeasure. Sounds tricky, so I can't promise any fast results.

For the time being, I've changed the error message so that it suggests to try reducing the source size. This will come live at the next update.

Thanks for letting us know!

Sergio

 
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