General developer forum

This problem appears to be caused only when there's a space in the file name, which causes it to be uuencoded (intentionally or accidentally).  Not sure if it's on the Blackboard side of the house, or BB's embedded zip program.  Pretty silly in this day and age...  I don't think the IMS CP standard calls for uuencoding of filenames, and if it does, it should work on both ends (uudecode in the LMS).

I tried manually renaming all the items to match each other, in the .dat, .xml, and .doc file, and zip them back up.  DIDN'T WORK!

I tried copying the course in BB, saving the Word Document files with 8.3 filenames and no spaces, deleting the original files, and export the course again (rather than manipulating the resulting zip file)--DIDN'T WORK!

                 "Sorry, the requested file could not be found"

I'm about ready to give up--been looking at that same error since I got the thing running, including 8 full hours today.  If I can't import BB classes, it will be a hard sell.  I'm assuming that of all the hundreds of people that have run into this problem or worked it, nobody has found a solution?

Thanks Eric, I've filed this as MDL-15725 for evaluation. Can I have some trials/votes/confirmation that this will patch works for all BB files and should go into core?

While we're on the topic ... does anyone want to volunteer to maintain the BB import module?

Thanks Eric that sure did it for me.
I am using 1.9 that upgraded from 1.8

Men, you're the best!

Eric,

Thanks very much for this code! It worked as expected!

One slight change would be to remove "$fileext . " on the line before rename() since it is an undeclared variable and it is not needed, I assume you moved two lines together and forgot to delete that bit. So the code now becomes:

//this bit of code grabs all files in the directory,
//and if they start with !, performs the name conversion
if ($handle = opendir("course_files/$subdir")) {
 while ($file = readdir($handle)) {
 if(substr($file,0,1)=="!"){
 $outputfilename = "";
 $filebase = substr($file,1,strrpos($file,".")-1);
 $filenamesplit = str_split($filebase,2);
 foreach($filenamesplit as $hexvalue){
 $outputfilename .= chr(hexdec($hexvalue));
 }
 $outputfilename .= strrchr($file,".");
 rename("course_files/$subdir/$file", "course_files/$subdir/$outputfilename");
 }
 }
 closedir($handle);
}

Both versions work, it's just this version doesn't give you a load of notices about undeclared variables when you try to import

Just to update anyone who is not watching MDL-15725, Dan has recently added a fix for filenames problem with Blackboard import to the latest 1.9.5+ and to HEAD. Please test the fix and provide feedback by commenting on MDL-15725. (You'll need a Moodle tracker account in order to do so.)