Turnitin - XML Response could not be parsed

Turnitin - XML Response could not be parsed

by Oliver Jackson -
Number of replies: 3

Hi!

I've just completed a Moodle upgrade to 3.9+ via a migration to a new server instance and am having major issues with the Turnitin assignment submission plugin.

My test of concept and process on Bitnami MAMP on MacOS (php7.4) has Turnitin performing perfectly.

My production site on Apache2/Mysql on Ubunbtu 20.04 (php7.4) won't complete submission of any assignment files (all PDF) and keeps returning the following error:

   Turnitin SDK Exception: responsexmlerror - XML Response could not be parsed

I know TII support for 3.9 is not official yet but it works fine on one system while not the other so I'm thinking I'm missing some PHP functionality with respect to XML or SOAP but cannot find what it might be. All basic Moodle requirements checks pass of course.

I've attached data from the apilog below in case anyone is excited about helping out in any way at all.

Regards

Average of ratings: -
In reply to Oliver Jackson

Re: Turnitin - XML Response could not be parsed

by Mohemmed Mustafa -

The issue is with the php version. When we install php on ubuntu 20.04 lts the version installed was php.7.4.3. I solved the issue by upgrading the php version.

Please try with the following commands

sudo apt install software-properties-common
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ondrej/php
apt install php7.4
apt install php7.4-common php7.4-mysql php7.4-xml php7.4-xmlrpc php7.4-curl php7.4-gd php7.4-imagick php7.4-cli php7.4-dev php7.4-imap php7.4-mbstring php7.4-opcache php7.4-soap php7.4-zip php7.4-intl -y

php will be upgraded to 7.4.9

After that restart apache

service apache2 restart

Hope this will help to resolve the issue. Thanks.

Average of ratings: -
In reply to Mohemmed Mustafa

Re: Turnitin - XML Response could not be parsed

by Oliver Jackson -

Hi Mohemmed Mustafa.

I've just given this a try on our test Moodle server and it definitely does the trick.

Thanks so much for the suggestion.

Now I have to become confident that everything else Moodle will be happy on PHP 7.4.9 for our production server...

Thank you again.

Average of ratings: -
In reply to Mohemmed Mustafa

Re: Turnitin - XML Response could not be parsed

by Zadok Lindt -

Just confirming, we encountered this exact problem in production (unfortunately the error did not pop up for us as part of the Moodle upgrade that got us into this state).  The steps above resolved the problem for us as well.

I am curious to know why a particular 7.4.x version of PHP combined with Moodle would result in  XML issues talking to Turnitin. Does it cause incorrect XML to be generated? Perhaps it causes correct XML to be generated, but in a form that Turnitin doesn't like?

Average of ratings: -