Missing data - Can I recover them?

[mendesrocha]

Hello all,

One of the Journal Manager of our Portal has just complained that while he was Setting Up his Journal he update the new data and after he submited these data, the page just refreshed and after refreshing, the data that he has inserted has just vanished! So, he wrote to the techincal support and asked us to recover this data.

He was updating the Step 3 of the Setup. Precisely the item 3.2.

We have backup of the Database one month ago, and my hope is to recover that data from this backup.

So, I have two questions:

1) Why this is happening?
2) Can we recover this data?
2.1) The editor was updating an already modified data.

Att.
Renato

[asmecher]

Hi Renato,

We haven't had reports of data loss on Setup page 3 -- there was an issue in OJS 2.1.1 and older that could cause data from page 5 to be lost if the "Save Settings" page was visited using the "Back" button, but this did not affect page 3. Unfortunately, without the issue being reproducible, it's difficult to find out what happened; if you're able to provide any more details, I may be able to look into it further.

As for recovering settings, you'll need to go back to a backup. To do so, I'd suggest restoring the MySQL backup to a temporary database, then selectively restoring entries from the journal_settings table. There is a list of the relevant settings in classes/manager/form/setup/JournalSetupStep3Form.inc.php in the JournalSetupStep3Form() constructor, e.g. for OJS 2.2:

Code: Select all

                parent::JournalSetupForm(
                        3,
                        array(
                                'authorGuidelines' => 'string',
                                'submissionChecklist' => 'object',
                                'copyrightNotice' => 'string',
                                'includeCreativeCommons' => 'bool',
                                'copyrightNoticeAgree' => 'bool',
                                'requireAuthorCompetingInterests' => 'bool',
                                'requireReviewerCompetingInterests' => 'bool',
                                'competingInterestGuidelines' => 'string',
                                'metaDiscipline' => 'bool',
                                'metaDisciplineExamples' => 'string',
                                'metaSubjectClass' => 'bool',
                                'metaSubjectClassTitle' => 'string',
                                'metaSubjectClassUrl' => 'string',
                                'metaSubject' => 'bool',
                                'metaSubjectExamples' => 'string',
                                'metaCoverage' => 'bool',
                                'metaCoverageGeoExamples' => 'string',
                                'metaCoverageChronExamples' => 'string',
                                'metaCoverageResearchSampleExamples' => 'string',
                                'metaType' => 'bool',
                                'metaTypeExamples' => 'string',
                                'copySubmissionAckPrimaryContact' => 'bool',
                                'copySubmissionAckSpecified' => 'bool',
                                'copySubmissionAckAddress' => 'string'
                        )
                );

In this listing, the setting names (e.g. "metaType") will identify the values of the "setting_name" column for each entry you'll need to restore from the backup's journal_settings table.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team