Submission checklist not displaying

Software Support
1

Hello all,

I’m having an unusual unserialize error.
The journal’s submission checklist (and maybe more data, I don’t know for sure) is not being displayed.
However, they are available in the database.

Log says:
unserialize(): Error at offset 3009 of 3014 bytes (/var/www/devojs.ibict.br/lib/pkp/classes/db/DAO.inc.php:350), referer: http://revista.ibict.br/ciinf/manager/setup/1 [Wed Apr 06 19:47:33 2016] [error] [client 192.168.0.241] NOTICE: unserialize(): Error at offset 12446 of 26778 bytes (/var/www/devojs.ibict.br/lib/pkp/classes/db/DAO.inc.php:350), referer: http://revista.ibict.br/ciinf/manager/setup [Wed Apr 06 19:47:33 2016] [error] [client 192.168.0.241] NOTICE: unserialize(): Error at offset 2938 of 2943 bytes (/var/www/devojs.ibict.br/lib/pkp/classes/db/DAO.inc.php:350), referer: http://revista.ibict.br/ciinf/manager/setup [Wed Apr 06 19:47:33 2016] [error] [client 192.168.0.241] NOTICE: unserialize(): Error at offset 13133 of 27611 bytes (/var/www/devojs.ibict.br/lib/pkp/classes/db/DAO.inc.php:350), referer: http://revista.ibict.br/ciinf/manager/setup [Wed Apr 06 19:47:33 2016] [error] [client 192.168.0.241] NOTICE: unserialize(): Error at offset 3151 of 3156 bytes (/var/www/devojs.ibict.br/lib/pkp/classes/db/DAO.inc.php:350), referer: http://revista.ibict.br/ciinf/manager/setup [Wed Apr 06 19:47:33 2016] [error] [client 192.168.0.241] NOTICE: unserialize(): Error at offset 12899 of 27376 bytes (/var/www/devojs.ibict.br/lib/pkp/classes/db/DAO.inc.php:350), referer: http://revista.ibict.br/ciinf/manager/setup [Wed Apr 06 19:47:33 2016] [error] [client 192.168.0.241] NOTICE: unserialize(): Error at offset 3009 of 3014 bytes (/var/www/devojs.ibict.br/lib/pkp/classes/db/DAO.inc.php:350), referer: http://revista.ibict.br/ciinf/manager/setup

This is a bit urgent, as we’re about to go live…

I have charset_normalization On in my config.inc.php.
Database charset is utf8-general-ci.

In /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/mysites-conf

php_value max_input_vars 900000
php_value upload_max_filesize 60M
php_value post_max_size 60M
php_value memory_limit 1G
2

Hi @ramon,

What’s the value of the submissionChecklist entry in the journal_settings table for the problem journal?

OJS stores certain settings (like that one) in the database in serialized form, and the error message is saying that PHP is having trouble unserializing it. This could be because there’s a change in your PHP installation’s serialization code (this used to happen occasionally with PHP updates but hasn’t happened for a long time as far as I’m aware), or the data has somehow gotten corrupted in the database (e.g. character set problems).

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

3

Hello @asmecher,

It was showing before I started importing data from other journals, but I didn’t check while I was importing to see when they stopped showing up. Also, settings from journal policies (extra additional items are not showing up either.

This is the content that should be unserialized for the submission checklist. It kept crashing this forum when pasting it…

This is the content from customAboutItems

4

Hi @ramon,

Nothing in that jumps out at me as the cause, meaning you’d probably have to work through the PHP serialization format to see if you can find a more subtle problem. But pragmatically the quickest thing to do is probably to save a copy of your DB, delete that setting from the DB, flush your cache files, and then pick the strings out of the dump and re-add them manually.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

5

Hello @asmecher,

Yep… went until 2AM adding all the customAboutItems and submissionChecklist items manually… really boring…

If anyone could test the system and throw some feedback… it’ll be swell… :slight_smile:

Thanks to all!!

6

Hi @ramon,

This is working in OJS; my suspicions are that either your PHP changed versions across an incompatibility in its own serialize function, or that your database encoding changed somehow, causing PHP to get different string lengths than it expected.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team