Installing and upgrading help

As G said, lots of  junk and yes, it could affect upgrade.

You can see just how much/many courses you might have that has MSO summaries by using DB query on the db for moodle:

select id,fullname,summary from mdl_course;

id above is the course ID.  fullname will help find the course in the 1.9.

If you see a bunch of MSO references (like those in the text file you provided) those are the courses you need to edit/change.  Would be best to do this in the Moodle user interface of the copy of current 1.9 version you are running, I would think, but there's a work-around … that does involve work.

When using the above query, copy and paste the results of one reference/record out into NotePad. Anything you can use that will strip out the MSO tags - you, obviously, want to keep the text … even if it's NOT formatted (teachers could reformat their summary after site is migrated).

Then, using something like phpmyadmin, edit the record pasting the 'scrubbed text' back into the summary field.

Since you've already tried the upgrade, the DB for the 2.0.10 probably needs to be dumped and a new one used.  Hopefully, you've followed advice given on upgrades and have been working with a copy of the 1.9 site.  Use the edited 1.9 DB.

While the error doesn't specifically mention this it is, I think, related.  IF your users have been copying and pasting from MSO, might want to increase the max_allowed_packet setting for the DB server.

Under [mysqld] in my.cnf file add a line:
max_allowed_packet=500M

Restart mysqld for changes to take affect.

Default    1048576 or 1M

If one gets errors in debug concerning the DB like the one you got, have found this reference to be handy:

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/server-system-variables.html

'spirit of sharing', Ken

Hi Jayne,

Definitely yes. Word-copied text includes insane amounts of code that are (usually) not needed anywhere but in Word itself (or in other MS applications).

To determine which courses have summary texts with Word formatting code, run the following SQL query (use phpMyAdmin, if you have it):

SELECT `id`, `shortname`, `fullname`
FROM `mdl_course`
WHERE `summary`
LIKE '%<w:WordDocument>%';

 In the SQL statement I selected a common Word formatting string (<w:WordDocument>), but you can use any of the ones that appear in your report. You could also search for several strings at the same time:

SELECT `id`, `shortname`, `fullname`
FROM `mdl_course`
WHERE `summary`
LIKE '%<w:WordDocument>%'
OR '%mso-style-name%';

You would then:

1. go to each listed course;

2. select the edit icon of the summary;

3. copy the text from the editor box and either:

a. paste it into notepad (or any plain text editor); copy it once again from notepad and then paste it into your Moodle summary editor box; or

b. run use a program like GetPlainText and then paste it back into the editor box.

4. save your changes.

Repeat these steps for each course listed by the SQL SELECT query.