DOI Setting is Serialised

ajrbyers · July 8, 2015, 9:01am

We’ve got something odd happening, an editor is changing the title of an article and for some bizarre reason OJS serialises the DOI into a PHP object… is there some logic that determines when the DOI is serialised, because I’d like to disable it…

asmecher · July 11, 2015, 5:54am

Hi @ajrbyers,

Unfortunately I’m drawing a blank on this – can you try to narrow down where this happens? We’re not using much at all in terms of AJAX in OJS 2.4.x, so I wonder if this isn’t due to a modification.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

ajrbyers · July 11, 2015, 10:45am

Hey @asmecher,

Not sure it’s an Ajax thing. User is just saving the metadata page and then when I check the pub-id::doi in the Db it’s been serialised as an object rather than just a string!

Cheers

asmecher · July 13, 2015, 7:31am

Hi @ajrbyers,

Ah, OK. The most likely source of this is the auto-detection of data types that happens when settings are stored in the database. Look at this line:

github.com

pkp/ojs/blob/9fbc348ed909d015626420d6bae7e2de013dfd23/classes/article/ArticleDAO.inc.php#L637


			// Non-localized settings will always be set.
			if ($isLocalized) {
				$this->update(
					'DELETE FROM article_settings WHERE article_id = ? AND setting_name = ? AND locale = ?',
					array($articleId, $name, $locale)
				);
				if (empty($value)) continue;
			}

			// Convert the new value to the correct type.
			$value = $this->convertToDB($value, $type);

			// Update the database.
			$this->replace('article_settings',
				array(
					'article_id' => $articleId,
					'setting_name' => $name,
					'setting_value' => $value,
					'setting_type' => $type,
					'locale' => $locale
				),

If the updateSetting function is called to store a DOI and the value passed to it is determined to be a PHP object, it’ll be serialized. I’ve never seen this happening in a stock version of OJS so I still suspect something funky is happening on your install, but perhaps you can trap it by adding some debugging output here.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team