09 October 2013, 23:06

Hi there,

I work at a secondary school in the north of the united kingdom, we've previously had our Mahara hosted by our local authority, Since then we've decided to go on our own and provide these services for ourselves.

I have downloaded and installed the relevant version of Mahara but any import from our existing to our new using the zip files containing the leap2a files fails with the message: "you did not select a valid leap2a file."

I have extracted the file and tried the .xml by itself which works but I need the files too, this worrys me as I have 150 users to import.

The version provided by our local authority is version 1.3.* with security patches stripped appart, rebuilt and added from new versions, Could this be causing me the issue?

I could really do with some advice on this if anyone could help i would greatly appreciate it.

10 October 2013, 12:13

Hi Gareth,

You get that "Maybe not a valid leap2a" message if any sort of ImportException is thrown during the import process. So if the XML file alone works, but not the file attachments, then it's probably not a problem with the file format, because most of the formatting stuff is in the XML file.

How big are the Leap2a files that you're trying to upload? Do even really small ones fail out?

We recently fixed a bug in Mahara 1.8 (which is probably present in older versions as well), where when the user was attempting to upload a Leap2a file that was larger than their server's limits allowed, they got an incorrect error message. So it could be something like that going on: https://bugs.launchpad.net/mahara/+bug/525632

To check for that, you could try increasing the "upload_max_size" and "post_max_size" settings in your php.ini file. See: https://wiki.mahara.org/index.php/System_Administrator%27s_Guide/Installing_Mahara#Adjust_your_PHP_settings

Another possibility is that there may be some issue with your dataroot directory, which is where Mahara tries to unzip the file to.

Also, what version of Mahara are you trying to import into?

Cheers,

Aaron

15 October 2013, 0:07

Hi Aaron,

I've tried both a 5mb Leap2a & a 340kb one, neither seem to work.

I've already had the upload and post max sizes increased for our moodle enviroment on the same server so this couldn't be an issue.

I had checked the permissions on the data directory and they're all good.

The version I am trying to import to is 1.3.0.

Cheers,

Gareth 

15 October 2013, 14:15

Hm, I'm out of specific theories for what's going on in that case. I can only advise the following:

1. Check for PHP error messages, which may give you more details about where it's failing. I believe in 1.3 you can add this (which you'll see as a comment in config-defaults.php) to your config.php file to get additional error details:

$cfg->log_dbg_targets     = LOG_TARGET_SCREEN | LOG_TARGET_ERRORLOG;
$cfg->log_info_targets    = LOG_TARGET_SCREEN | LOG_TARGET_ERRORLOG;
$cfg->log_warn_targets    = LOG_TARGET_SCREEN | LOG_TARGET_ERRORLOG;
$cfg->log_environ_targets = LOG_TARGET_SCREEN | LOG_TARGET_ERRORLOG;

That will cause errors to be printed to your server's log file (usually /var/log/apache2/error.log if you're running Ubuntu Linux) as well as to the web browser.

2. See if the Leap2a can be imported by a more recent version of Mahara. (The only versions we're still actively maintaining are 1.5 and up)

Cheers,

Aaron

15 October 2013, 16:15

Hello Gareth,

You can try logging in to http://demo.mahara.org with the admin account and upload your Leap2A file there and see if that works. That is a Mahara 1.7. Then you don't need to install your own for this test. :-)

Cheers

Kristina