Handle Export of Objects as Background Tasks

1 Initial Problem

In the recent weeks we had to do a lot of exports on our ILIAS platform. Many of them included many courses or entire categories with lots of big files and objects in them. Since the exports where done as a normal server request, the exports sometime exeeded all time limits and the users got a timeout message from our load balancer / webserver. The export process as such might have still been running in the "background" (for example if the load balancer ran into a timeout but the webserver worker did not, yet).

That means, that users need to know BEFORE exporting how big the export will be and long it might take (and make sure that the php execution time is long enough and there is no timeout in your loadbalancer etc...) That is notr feasible for "odinary" non-superadmin users and it makes exporting lagre containers a tedious task.

2 Conceptual Summary

We would like to make the ILIAS export a background task. When a user starts the export of an object, a background task schould be started.

The user shoud then be notified whether the export was a success or whether an error has occurred (the background tasks can do that, I think). After finishing the export, a user can the click on the repective background task and jump to the relevant context.

3 User Interface Modifications

3.1 List of Affected Views

• the [Export] tab of any object

3.2 User Interface Details

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3.3 New User Interface Concepts

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3.4 Accessibility Implications

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4 Technical Information

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5 Privacy

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6 Security

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7 Contact

• Author of the Request: Falkenstein, Rob [rob], Glaubitz, Marko [mglaubitz]
• Maintainer: Meyer, Stefan [smeyer]
• Implementation of the feature is done by: Meyer, Stefan [smeyer]

8 Funding

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• Universität Freiburg

9 Discussion

10 Implementation

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Test Cases

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• {Test case number linked to Testrail} : {test case title}

Approval

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