Http error 500 when exporting items for Blackboard

[galettof]

Hi, this something I mentioned in the MyOpenMath Support forum a while back. At the request of my IT department, I am posting here, since we don't have a solution yet.

When exporting items from a course to add to our LMS: after clicking 'Download Export Cartridge' we get an HTTP ERROR 500. Here's my admin's message:

I enabled debugging for IMathAS and tried exporting a course. The error being thrown is "Invalid Course ID". I tried searching the GitHub repository to see if others had issues, but I couldn't find anything. You may want to contact the author of IMathAS.

Here is David Lippman's response in the forum:

Which LMS were you trying to export for? My only guess is maybe something else was going on. It might help to open up the developer console in the browser and open the network tab and watch it when you try to do the export, to see if there's a redirect happening or something.

The LMS is Blackboard. But I tried selecting something else and we get the same issue.

And here's the update from my admin (not in the MyOpenMath forum). I also asked if this could be a permissions issue, since we had those in the past:

The IMathAS directory and subdirectories are owned by the apache user, and the other export functions are working correctly (Export OEA JSON and Export for another IMathAS system). It's just the LMS exports that aren't working.

I also verified there are no redirects happening. You can enable debugging by appending ?debug=true to the end of the URL if you want to try it as well.

If there is anything else we could try or if there is information about our setup that I can provide to help us diagnose the issue, please let me know and I will pass it along to my admin. Thanks!

[drlippman]

Sorry for not replying earlier; notifications of github issues often get buried in my email and I don't check on here often.

The key to diagnosing 500 errors is looking at the php error log, as there will almost always be something there to indicate what the issue was. My first guess would also be a permissions issue, but if you're exporting a huge course it could also be a size issue (either disk or memory). Also, the Bb export uses the ZipArchive function to generate the .zip file Bb requires, and the PHP manual says that your PHP has to be compiled with zip support enabled, so it's possible yours isn't. Again, the error log should be able to help track down if that's the cause.

[galettof]

No problem, and thanks for the information! We've temporarily put this project on hold so we won't be able to get back to it immediately, but I'll report back if/when we can try again per your suggestions.