TOPIC:

A user has reported that a Xerte Online Toolkit project that they had completed back in May 2019 with 21pgs now only has 13pgs. They only discovered there were missing pages when they went to add more content. The learning object was deployed to Blackboard Learn using the embed code, so what is on the server and in Blackboard Learn should be identical.

What is odd is that the learning object on Blackboard Learn and the version on our Xerte server have the same id but the server version has 13pgs and the Blackboard Learn version has 21pgs. Q. How is that possible?

Note: the access level for this learning object is set to other with the url of our Blackboard Learn site. We are currently migrating Learn to the Cloud this week, so Learn has been set to "Read-Only." I did wonder if that could be causing two different versions.

Version
Xerte Online Toolkit v3.6 (git v3.6.4)


Second question
Is anyone using version control for their Xerte content? If so, what are you using?

many thanks in advance,
Alison

Hi Alison

The data for each project is kept in an xml file & there are two versions of this on the server - one that's used in the editor (preview.xml) & one that is the published live version (data.xml). Most of the time these contain the same data but they won't always - for example if you make changes in the editor but don't publish then the live version won't be updated. There was a bug a while ago where you could end up with two editors open & this could cause issues with losing content. It sounds like you have something like this going on here - embedded version is using data.xml but when you open it in editor you are looking at preview.xml where for some reason data has been lost.

You need to get a copy of the USER-FILES folder for this project & see what's in there. It saves the last 10 versions of the data & preview.xml files so you should be able to either find a version of preview.xml that contains the missing data or, if you are happy with the content in the live version then duplicate the data.xml to be the new preview.xml file. Make sure you back up the xml files in case anything doesn't work when you're doing this. Also don't open the project in the editor until you've got a copy of all the xml files as every time you do this you are deleting the oldest backup - you don't want all the 10 last versions to be missing the data you're trying to find.

I hope this helps.

Just in case anyone else comes across this issue, here is how we resolved it:
1. Log into the Xerte admin interface (could probably be done from the users Xerte workspace too I suspect)
2. Locate user project
3. Click on Properties and export as Archive.zip
4. Log into Xerte frontend (normal user account)
5. Import the archive.zip
In our scenario the archive.zip of the 13pg LO contained all the missing pages that we were looking for. Importing back into the Xerte workspace made all pages available again.
No data lost!
Note: Looking at the USER-FILES for the individual user confirmed the content was there.
Alison