Bug in course import - fixed!

Site Operators
1

Hi everyone.

For those of you running the most recent codebase: there may be a bug in the course import which affects courses that show code to learners.

One of my colleagues and I found a bug in the course import function on edX.org recently. Occasionally, when creating a new run of a course, it drops assessments from the course. The old run might have, for instance, problems #1 through #8, and the new run will be missing, say, problems #2 and #5.

At the moment, this only seems to affect assessments with a <pre> tag next to a <code> tag, and even then it’s not 100% certain. There’s probably some sort of other factor involved – location, other tags, etc. We’re not exactly sure when the bug was introduced, but I think it was before January 13th.

I raised this with edX Partner Support, who were able to recreate the bug. They said:
“The ticket has been triggered with engineering, but it may take a few weeks before it gets picked up. There are other problems that have higher priority.”

If I hear anything more on this I’ll let you know.

2

Update from the folks at edX:

“We’ve been on the phone with our escalation team and they’re prioritizing the ticket for review on Monday. I should have more of an update on Tuesday at the latest.”

3

Further updates:

“Good news, engineerings have found a solution to ensure export/import of new runs/courses works appropriately. They are currently testing a solution. It should be released between today and tomorrow.”

4

From Partner Support: “The fix is ready to go out on tomorrow’s product release.”

Usual caveats apply - things may get delayed, need extra testing, etc.

5

Today, partner support informed me that the fix is currently in for this problem. To quote: “The fix is in production. We were able to import one of your impacted courses in a partner support test course. The impacted units were visible in the test course.”