Hi I am using Moodle to host my Articulate published Scorm courses.
These are freezing on launching and not making it past the loading screen. This causes the browser (IE7 & 8) to crash but upon restarting the activties will normally load OK second time. We are using Flash 10 and this has occurred on various machines not just our company network.
I have seen other threads that mentions similar problems, but have not seen a resolution.
Does anyone have any ideas?
Thanks
Richard.
hi richard, can you tell us a little more about this issue?
what version of moodle are you using? where are you hosting?
about the freezing, it only happens with IE7 & IE8? it works ok in firefox and chrome?
Hi Franco, thanks for your reply.
We are using Moodle 1.9.7 This is being hosted by a supplier who use Rackspace in the UK.
Our company systems only use IE7 or 8 so I have not tested on any other browser and certainly would not be able to change users browsers to anything else.
Hope this helps, if you need any more info, please let me know.
Thanks
Richard.
Could I suggest that you try this from home??? Does it happen outside your network? If it does, then you perhaps should be able to try Firefox (from home) and test again. This will determine if in your case it is a network issue or a browser issue.
We worked on this problem for nearly a year at our company. After trying many solutions - none of which worked - we finally converted our 700 locations to use FIREFOX when launching moodle. Since then, we have not had a SINGLE incident of screen freezes.
If anyone has another workaround that utilizes MSIE, I'd like to hear it too.
I had this problem with SCORM packages created by Captivate. After a lot of troubleshooting I found it happened every time we used the animated text option anywhere in the project. Now we just don't use animated text. Pick through your project removing things one at a time until it starts to work. That should help you identify the issue. Don't forget to clear your cache before each test too. If you figure it out be sure to post it here so others can benefit.
Hi Dave
By this I presume you mean to remove all powerpoint animations before publishing. Sounds strange but can give it a go.
Yes, I'll certainly post back here when I get this resolved.
Thanks
hmmm. We have the same issue with prolonged latency (screen freezes but does progress) with some of our Captivate SCORM packages. I thought it may be the network (largest school in the Northern Territory trying to manage on 10mb bandwidth - seriously inadequate), but I was leaning towards the way in which Captivate passes the SCORM results over to Moodle! Perhaps there is an inefficiency in this method.
We noticed issues with our Articulate products loaded onto Moodle last fall. A couple of us upgraded to IE 8 this morning and we are having ZERO issues right now with the modules hanging up.
We noticed issues with our Articulate products loaded onto Moodle last fall. A couple of us upgraded to IE 8 this morning and we are having ZERO issues right now with the modules hanging up.
We're having the same problems, with IE8.
What happens is that the browser gets hung up waiting for files. Different files each time. XML, PNG, MP3, it doesn't seem to matter.
I used wireshark to analyse the tcp transmission and I can see that the browser is returning a zero window state to server.
Netstat shows TIME_WAITs
Eventually the connections are released on the browser and the package completes loading. It always takes ~300 seconds.
We tried the package on scorm test track and it performed fine. So, although it does seem to be a problem on the client, some interaction/setting on the server is causing it.
We've tried:
There are other users describing the same problem:
http://www.articulate.com/forums/70678-post23.html
http://community.articulate.com/forums/p/1144/5009.aspx
I've attached a debug log.
You can see where the crash happens. LMSCommit is called and then nothing happens for 5 minutes. At this time the browser is returning zero window to the server.
166:Wed May 4 01:35:39 UTC+0100 2011 - Calling LMSCommit
167:Wed May 4 01:40:40 UTC+0100 2011 - strResult=false
We're working around this by putting a 5 second timout in place. The alert was just for debugging so we can tell it's working.
===================================================================
--- request.js (revision 199)
+++ request.js (revision 200)
@@ -27,6 +27,8 @@
//popupwin(url+"\n"+param);
httpReq.open("POST", url,false);
httpReq.setRequestHeader('Content-Type', 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded');
+ httpReq.timeout = 5000;
+ httpReq.ontimeout = DoRequestTimeout;
httpReq.send(param);
if (httpReq.status == 200) {
//popupwin(url+"\n"+param+"\n"+httpReq.responseText);
@@ -36,6 +38,10 @@
}
}
+function DoRequestTimeout() {
+ //alert('DoRequested timed out after 5sec');
+}
+
Unfortunately, httpReq.timeout doesn't work in IE7, so we're working on a workaround.
Here is a fix that sends the IE7 request asyncronously and times out the IE8 freeze. It always returns true for IE7, but we've isolated that to IE7. However, there is no error returned to the user anyway when LMSCommit fails so this doesn't seem any more risky than the standard implementation, which also fails silently.
function DoRequest(httpReq,url,param) {
if (navigator.appVersion.indexOf("MSIE 7.")!=-1) {
// This is IE7
httpReq.open("POST", url,true);
httpReq.setRequestHeader('Content-Type', 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded');
httpReq.send(param);
return 'true';
}
else {
// httpReq.open (Method("get","post"), URL(string), Asyncronous(true,false))
//popupwin(url+"\n"+param);
httpReq.open("POST", url,false);
httpReq.setRequestHeader('Content-Type', 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded');
httpReq.timeout = 5000;
httpReq.ontimeout = DoRequestTimeout;
httpReq.send(param);
if (httpReq.status == 200) {
//popupwin(url+"\n"+param+"\n"+httpReq.responseText);
return httpReq.responseText;
} else {
return httpReq.status;
}
}
}
function DoRequestTimeout() {
//alert('DoRequested timed out after 5sec');
}
Ezra,
Thank you for linking my question to this post. I will redirect the conversation to this post, because it seems like the same issue.
Where do I place the code provided in the previous post?
Micky
mod/scorm/request.js
Replace the 2nd function from the top (DoRequest) with this code.
Patch is attached as well. To apply it, copy it to the mod/scorm directory and run the following command (assumes a linux server):
patch < request.js.diff
Ezra, thank you for your quick reply.
I added the code to request.js (attached - I pasted and formatted to mirror your layout) and still am stuck at "Loading...". When it shows "Loading...", has the SWF technically downloaded to my computer? One of my techs said it could be a firewall issue, so I turned off the firewall (windows 7) and am still getting this message.
Here is the debug message:
Thought the Javascript code mod didn't fix it, enabling the structure page and clicking "start a new attempt" did. It seems to be related to Review mode.
I will try removing the javascript code mod to see if it still works when "start a new attempt" is checked. BTW - I have a thread to try to find a way to require that every time a SCORM is launched, it starts a new attempt, so Review Mode never launches.
Right now, we are contemplation if we want to upgrade to moodle 2.0, which will let us force a new attempt (disabling Review mode) each time. We will also consider the feasability of porting this 2.0 code to 1.9.
Thanks to a client giving me access to their server where this was occuring I think I've managed to track the issue down - keep an eye on MDL-28295 for the fix which will hopefully land in next weeks stable release.
BTW - We ended up adding a button that would let users delete prior attempts if their SCORM doesn't load.
Hi Dan,
I applied your patch to 2.0.4, and it seems to fix IE7 - awesome! However, the same popup still freezes in IE8. Do you have any insight? Maybe I applied the path wrongly...? Here's how I applied the patch:
Thanks for any insight you can provide.
Hi Gabe,
good to hear! - I haven't done any testing of IE 8 yet but we do have this:
http://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-28551
try the fix posted in the forum and see if that resolves it for you? - if not we'll need lots of information on how to reproduce it - including SCORM object, IIS/Apache (what versions) php version, what php extensions are installed etc etc.
thanks!
FYI - I'm not sure, but this modification to request.js may be causing issues in IE 8 when compatibility mode is turned on.
http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=182002
It might be worth testing out.