20 August 2010, 13:35

I'm working with a faculty member of a annual review portfolio (due Monday), and we've come across a problem displaying a folder with subfolders in her portfolio view.  She has lots of images for each of 20 productions she was designer for.  So we have a folder called Shows, with subfolders for each of the shows, and around 10-20 images (jpg files) typically in each of the subfolders.

In constucting the portfolio view we added a Folder block on the view, pointed at the top level Shows folder.  That presented a nice concise arrangement on the view, listing the subfolders within the Shows folder on the view.  Clicking on any of the folders lists the image files that makes up the content of that folder, but the image icons are missing, and clicking on the link to any of the images pops you out to the main home page for our Mahara installation.

Interestingly, if I add a folder block to any of the subfolders in the Shows folder (say Show A), then links to the image files works in that new folder block.  And in the original folder block pointing to the top level Shows folder, file icons and links for the files in Show A subfolder work, but not for Show B, Show C, Show D, etc.

It's as if the access permissions given to the top level folder Shows aren't being inherited by the subfolders within Shows, as part of that portfolio view.  Is that the way it's supposed to work? Or do we have some problem with permissions in our Mahara installation?  I would think that if I'm adding a folder with subfolders to a portfolio view, I want people who have access to the view to be able to access the folder and all of the subfolders.

Thanks for any help you can provide on this problem.

keith landa
teaching, learning, and technology center
purchase college suny

22 August 2010, 17:35

Hi Keith,

When you put a folder into a view, anyone who can see the view should also be able to see all its subfolders and download any files contained in those subfolders.

We did have a bug in this area once before (see https://bugs.launchpad.net/mahara/+bug/547593), so if you have a very old Mahara you may be able to fix the problem by upgrading.

The same problem can be caused if your site's cron is not set up correctly (there is a bit of an explanation in the thread at http://mahara.org/interaction/forum/topic.php?id=1062)

If you suspect this might be the problem, you can find the instructions for setting up cron here:

http://wiki.mahara.org/index.php?title=System_Administrator%27s_Guide/Cron_Job

If none of these things helps, then it may be a bug. If you can reproduce the problem on a site running the latest code, e.g. on mahara.org (stable) or http://master.dev.mahara.org (testing), then it's likely to be nothing to do with your server's set up, and we'll need to file a new bug report.

R.