Error while exporting
July 20, 2023 12:00 AM
Whenever I try to export my scenario it fails, giving an error 'Item not found'. I have exported this scenario before and it worked fine then. Others exporting my scenario do not seem to run into the same problem as me.
How can I solve this?
Discussion (3)
This is indeed a problematic error, as it doesn't indicate which item is missing, or in which scene(s) the item should have been present. I've tried finding out which item is missing using Fiddler (see attachment), but no clues so far. After 120+ lines/requests, it just shows a 404 error message:
It seems that trial and error by deleting one scene at a time and then exporting is the only solution. But with some of our scenario's consisting of 30+ scenes, that is a time consuming job. Please advise!
I have to say, as a one-time software product development manager, that my biggest personal gripe about software in general is useless error messages. The purpose of an error message is to tell the end-user what to do! If the message boils down to "That did not work," it is essentially useless.
Clearly the CVR back-end code "knows" which item is missing. Tell your customers! Of course, another CVR gripe makes that harder: items don't have unique names! I have scenarios with dozens of items with exactly the same name, as shown in the dropdown. I know they have unique identifiers in the back end, but that doesn't help the person trying to figure out which blue circle is the one that's referred to.
I've tried several things to work around this issue:
deleting a couple of scenes (randomly chosen); publishing mostly worked, but pasting these scenes back and trying to publish the entire scenario gave the same error
checking whether there is a maximum of scenes; no, 45+ scenes is not a problem with other scenarios
checking whether there is a maximum of scenario size; no, 5Gb or more is not a problem with other scenarios
creating a new scenario and copy pasting all the scenes to that scenario; very time consuming, gave the same error when trying to publish
In the end, we decided to cut the scenario into two. Not ideal, but it works, both parts are now published. Still NO clue at all what causes the "File not found" error, but finally we can do testing rounds with students and have the scenarios ready when classes start at the end of August.