HTTP error prevents adding or editing quiz questions

HTTP error prevents adding or editing quiz questions

by Tony Delahunty -
Number of replies: 3

I am getting the error described before in Moodle 1.9 where quiz edting (and some other) pages cannot be served, seemingly due to specific charcacters being in the returnurl parameter.  However, the fix described here to unset Verify Normalisation in the ISA server has not fixed this for me.  Looking at Microsoft Knowledge Base, it seems I should now try to turn off the Block high-bit characters check box in the ISA Server [- but I won't be able to try this for a day or two, due to network specifics here].

Has anuyone else encountered and resolved this (either as above via the ISA server settings, or otherwise)?   It seems quite critical, meaning that in practice staff cannot create quizzes, since many of the add/edit question screens produce this error.  And isn't there a Moodle coding solution (i.e. server-side) to 'fix' the returnurl being set, rather than rely on the client's ISA settings to permit certain pages to display?

Thanks, Tony

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In reply to Tony Delahunty

Re: HTTP error prevents adding or editing quiz questions

by Tim Hunt -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers
The problem is that what ISS is doing is violating the HTTP specification. I don't know why Microsoft thought that was a good idea - well I did read their knowledge base article at one point, but I was not convinced with their reasoning.

I do not have a copy of ISS to test on, and I don't really have the time or inclination to work round Microsoft's bugs. (Actually, that is not quite true, I spend enough time making things work in Internet Explorer.) If someone is able to to find a workaround for this on the Moodle side of things, attach it to a tracker issue, and I will happily check it in (providing it does not totally screw up the rest of the code). But this will only get sorted out if some ISS users invest the time. Sorry.
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In reply to Tim Hunt

Re: HTTP error prevents adding or editing quiz questions

by Tony Delahunty -

Fair enough, and I haven't found a way of getting the ISA server stiings to reverse the error behaviour anyway; so short of a proper moodle-side fix, I've just commented out the second parameter in the call

    $questionurl = new moodle_url("$CFG->wwwroot/question/question.php",
                                array('returnurl' => $returnurl)); 

within the question_list function in question/editlib.php.

This fixes my error at the expense of dropping the returnurl entirely from the URL stream of the Editing a Question screens (which doesn't seem to mean the loss of anything critical, or am I missing something?).

Tony

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In reply to Tony Delahunty

Re: HTTP error prevents adding or editing quiz questions

by Brenda Hammond -

I started getting an error this morning when I tried to create questions for a quiz, and found this thread. I can tweak the code, but I need pretty detailed quidance. I have found the line of code you refer to, but I don't understand what exactly needs to be commented out.

Thank you!

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