[Building Sakai] Turnitin issue with new users

[Bryan Bakotich]

I did some more work with Turnitin today and got things working for us. It
turns out I wasn't using session properly in one of the calls. Here's what
we have that's working now:

   - Before the main for loop in the processQueue method we get a session-id
   (We do this as the default instructor account)
   - We append '&session-id=*sessionid*' onto the API calls in enrollInClass
   and the actual call to submit the paper. You don't need to put the sessionid
   in the md5 string when generating the md5
   - At the end of the for loop we end the session

I haven't put this in production yet, but it seems to be working fine on our
dev server with every test that I've thrown at it so far.

-Bryan

On Mon, Apr 11, 2011 at 7:24 AM, Earle Nietzel <earle.nietzel at gmail.com>wrote:

> Hi Bryan,
>
> We've run into the same issue and have been chatting with Turnitin but they
> have not shared as much data with us as they have with you.
>
> I appreciate your sharing and detailed explanation.
>
> IMHO at this point it seems to be a turnitin issue with their back end
> systems.
>
> I would be in favor of an approach where we would check for this condition
> and simply retry the same transaction at a later date. I think the way it
> works now is that it is marked as an error and never gets retried.
>
> Earle
>
>
> On Fri, Apr 8, 2011 at 5:51 PM, Bryan Bakotich <bakotibj at plu.edu> wrote:
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> We have seen quite a few errors while submitting papers to Turnitin
>> recently. The error listed in the database is this:
>>
>> *Submission Error: There was an error building up the user session data
>> to submit the paper.  Please verify the user information being used.(250)
>> *
>>
>> The first time we ever saw this error was at the beginning of this March.
>> Since then we've seen it 60+ times. I can reproduce this error by submitting
>> an attachment to a Turnitin assignment as a student that has never used
>> Turnitin before. If I set the status of the records back to 1 and try to
>> submit them a second time it works fine. So the issue seems to have to do
>> with the user being created with the web service call to Turnitin.
>>
>> I have contacted our Turnitin rep and worked back and forth with an
>> engineer for a while and was unable to modify the webservice calls to make
>> this error go away. They told me to use a session-id in the api calls and
>> that should fix the issue. After that didn't work I sent them all the
>> information from the calls that were being made and this is what they told
>> me:
>>
>> *It  appears that the join class call is happening before the database
>> has had a chance to propagate the information from the master to the slave
>> databases from the create user call, even while using the session id.  I'll
>> let you know if we discover anything.  Sorry I don't have anything more
>> concrete for you right now.*
>>
>> The only other suggestion they gave me was putting a delay in between the
>> join class call and the submit paper call. Has anyone else run into this
>> issue recently and is there a solution to it other than a delay or should I
>> just put in a 3-5 second delay like they suggested? Thanks for any help.
>>
>> -Bryan
>>
>> --
>> Bryan Bakotich
>> Open Source Implementation Specialist
>> Digital Media Center, Information & Technology Services
>> Pacific Lutheran University
>> Tacoma, WA 98447-0013
>> Phone: 253-536-5021
>>
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>


-- 
Bryan Bakotich
Open Source Implementation Specialist
Digital Media Center, Information & Technology Services
Pacific Lutheran University
Tacoma, WA 98447-0013
Phone: 253-536-5021
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