View Access Dates Changing

[Jesse Friedman @ UCSF]

After assigning start and stop dates in the View Access page and saving, the dates will automatically change. We've continually had it change the start date to date in 2018, and the end date to date in 2001. This results in the view share failing every time a student uses the date field.

Mahara version 1.2.3 (2009111010)
Platform: VMWare ESX Server 3.5 running
Operating System: Red Hat Linux 5.1
Database Info: PostgreSQL 8.1.11

[Ruslan Kabalin (rkabalin)]

Hi, Not sure if I understood correctly. If the end date in the view access is before the start one, it should not let you to save it at all and it does not change the date you had entered.

[Jesse Friedman @ UCSF (jesse-friedman)]

After saving the view with an applicable date, if you open access control again, the dates will have shifted wildly to these new dates. I never actually save these incorrect dates - they shift to them automatically when any dates are entered and saved.

[Ruslan Kabalin (rkabalin)]

Hi Jesse, can you please make some more investigation. Would be great if you provide exact dates you set (exactly how they look like in date field) and the dates they are changed to "automatically" (again preserving format). Try to do that three or four times with different initial dates. Are they changed automatically to the same date or to different ones? What language do you use?

[Jesse Friedman @ UCSF (jesse-friedman)]

I'll follow up with more details shortly. In the meantime, i wanted to connect you to the forum discussion i started as well:

http://mahara.org/interaction/forum/topic.php?id=1742

[Jesse Friedman @ UCSF (jesse-friedman)]

See attached compiled screenshot for examples of date shifting. In each example, i set some random start and stop dates, then saved, and reopened the access page.

[Richard Mansfield (richard-mansfield)]

We may not fix this bug anytime soon as Mahara 1.3 is going to require PHP >= 5.2 for other reasons.

[Jesse Friedman @ UCSF (jesse-friedman)]

What is the possibility that we could add an option to simply disable the date limiting feature site wide?

Do you have any workaround recommendations to do in the meantime? It's causing a lot of issues for us, as students seem prone to adding date in, even when none are needed.

[Richard Mansfield (richard-mansfield)]

As discussed on that forum thread, I think the easiest fix is to check in view/access.php what the php version is, and if it's less than 5.2.0, make sure you call that workaround version of strptime that's sitting inside the "if (!function_exists)..." bit, maybe using a different name to avoid declaring the same function twice. If you attach a patch here we'll apply it to the Mahara 1.2 series.

[Steven (stevens-q)]

Mahara 1.8 testing
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This seems to be partially fixed now - the end dates are displaying correctly after the initial setting for the dates and any subsequent return to this page - but the "From" fields are blank

The expected result would be to see the dates that I had set when returning to this share page

[Aaron Wells (u-aaronw)]

Specifically, we clear out access rule start dates and stop dates that are in the past. This happens in two ways:

1. When you save an access rule, if its start date is in the past, we don't save the start date.

2. When you view the access rules page, if an access rule has its end date in the past, we don't show that access rule, and it gets deleted when you hit save.

However, that's not the same as the issue the original bug reporter was describing.