[OJS 3.1.2.4.] Submission and Publication Metadata won't load

Hi, I am a web officer of a journal, using an OJS version of 3.1.2.4. As we are cleaning up our journal sections, we found that the section cannot be deleted unless all articles in that section is moved to other section. However, upon opening the “Submission and Publication Metadata” to change the section, we encountered a problem.

The metadata of that particular article won’t load, and upon inspection, we found an error saying:

"
Uncaught SyntaxError: Unexpected end of JSON input
at Function.parse [as parseJSON] ()
at a.pkp.controllers.TabHandler.dataFilter (pkp.min.js?v=3.1.2.4:199)
at Object.dataFilter (pkp.min.js?v=3.1.2.4:111)
at Ut (jquery.min.js?v=3.1.2.4:2)
at k (jquery.min.js?v=3.1.2.4:2)
at XMLHttpRequest. (jquery.min.js?v=3.1.2.4:2)

[Deprecation] Synchronous XMLHttpRequest on the main thread is deprecated because of its detrimental effects to the end user’s experience. For more help, check https://xhr.spec.whatwg.org/.
"

I have searched the forum for similar issues, but to no avail. Any help will be much appreciated. Thank you very much

Hi @Gilbert_Lazarus,

I’d suggest using your web browser’s developer tools to look at the JSON response that OJS is sending to the browser. There could be a number of issues – a PHP warning or error inserted into the JSON output, or an invalid UTF8 character – to explain this, and inspecting the response will help narrow it down.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team