OPA issues

From Harambee Wiki

1 Administration Issues
2 User Issues

Administration Issues

Timing Out

When a user logs in to OPA Harambee, a session is created which allows them to access the secure-area of the site. At the moment, such sessions time-out after 30 minutes of inactivity. (From the servers point of view, inactivity means requesting new web pages: so, if they spent 30 minutes typing on the same page, that would still be seen by the server as inactivity).

Therefore, when the user hits the Submit button on the Review page, the system check if the session is still active. When it finds it has timed-out, the user is brought to the login screen again and it 'seems' like the review data is lost. In fact, if the user does login at this point, the data will be lost.

There are a number of ways to solve this:

Increase the session-timeout period to any number you want - let me know what amount of time you feel is reasonable. The change does require a restart of OPA Harambee (which will only take a couple of minutes) so I'll wait for your go-ahead before doing so as there appear to be a couple of users logged in at the moment
We can tell the users to be alert out for this. If they follow the steps I describe below they will not lose their data. So, if the user is returned to the Log-In screen when he/she has hit the Submit button, he/she should:
- immediately hit the back-button on their browser - this will bring up the review page, with all of the data still intact
- open another tab on the browser (or another window if the browser doesn't support tabs) and sign in to OPA Harambee on that screen - this will create a new session
- then go back to the first browser tab or window, and click the Submit button again. This will register the review data in the database
If it helps, I can put a 'timer' in the Review page to alert users to the amount time left on their session (in fact we could put it on every page if necessary). This could be an invisible timer with a visible alert (e.g. a pop-up box telling them their session has timed out), or a visible timer near the submit button which they could check before hitting the submit button.

Let me know what you want me to change the time-out value to and I will do it immediately. As I said, it will mean restarting OPA Harambee so I may need to coordinate with you if I find anybody is logged in.

Also, if you feel the timer/alert system is worth doing I can probably do it tonight or tomorrow.(I think I could add it to a footer script which already included on every page, so it might not be hard to do - I'll check tonight).

[edit]

Doubling of Scores

I'm suspecting it was an application rather than user error right? The record-id were consecutive so its as if they pressed the submit button twice but either way it should have recognised that the update was already done. This lack of atomic processing (i.e. a multi-table database update should either happen completely or not at all) is a major flaw in OPA. It doesn't manifest too much as there are not too many places where more than one table is being updated.

Anyway if you have any other info on the double scores let me know.

[edit]