1025228 - some thimble remixes won't save because of a 500 error

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Webmaker Graveyard :: Thimble, defect)

Description

[Flore Allemandou [:flore]]

Example of 2 remixes impossible to save (even without making any modification other than remix):
https://thimble.webmaker.org/project/58829/remix
https://thimble.webmaker.org/project/58705/remix

Error generated : Désolé, une erreur s'est produite lors de la publication. {"status":500,"message":"Error: [object Object]"}

However, it is possible to save other makes with the same account and computer. So not a local problem, obviously.

Comment 1

[Jon Buckley [:jbuck]]

Attachment: https://github.com/mozilla/MakeAPI/pull/224

Comment 2

[Jon Buckley [:jbuck]]

Attachment: https://github.com/mozilla/make-valet/pull/63

Comment 3

[Jon Buckley [:jbuck]]

Attachment: https://github.com/mozilla/thimble.webmaker.org/pull/432

Comment 4

[Jon Buckley [:jbuck]]

STR:

1) Put Thimble UI into French
2) Save the default project (project a)
3) Remix project a (project b)
4) Attempt to save project b, curse your misfortune as you only get HTTP 500's for your trouble

Analysis:

This is a hilariously obtuse bug. The root cause was having a é (e with accent) character in thimble project a's URL. When you attempt to save the remix, it looks up the original thimble project by URL. The MakeAPI had a bug where it would decide the URL twice, turning '%C3%A9' into 'é' into the unicode not found character (I can't type it in bugzilla, it'll strip my comment). This actually appears to be a bug within the node querystring module, which it has its own decoding method. Since it couldn't find the original thimble project, it left the URL in the `req.body.remixedFrom` variable. When Thimble attempted to publish the remix to the MakeAPI, Thimble would pass the URL as the remixedFrom parameter, which is not valid. You can only pass an ID to remixedFrom. On a side note, this would cause an exception inside the MakeAPI, when it tried to access the email key of undefined.

So, we fixed Thimble to not mix up a remixedFromURL and a remixedFromMakeId, and modified the MakeAPI to not decode URLs twice. Then the make-valet broke because it sent a double-escaped URL to the MakeAPI. So we had to fix that too.

Yay!

Comment 5

[[github robot]]

Commit pushed to master at https://github.com/mozilla/thimble.webmaker.org

https://github.com/mozilla/thimble.webmaker.org/commit/ac06a1ab7ffec317721a51a95a82a46723237a41
Bug 1025228 - Don't mix data types in the same variable

Comment 6

[[github robot]]

Commit pushed to master at https://github.com/mozilla/MakeAPI

https://github.com/mozilla/MakeAPI/commit/7d50aab5f200aea9a5df679689c319953e548785
Bug 1025228 - Don't decode URLs twice

Comment 7

[[github robot]]

Commit pushed to master at https://github.com/mozilla/make-valet

https://github.com/mozilla/make-valet/commit/b8c8745ece49efafeee8597d1b3df34bd329028b
Bug 1025228 - Decode path component of URL

Comment 8

[Jon Buckley [:jbuck]]

And we're good on prod.

:flore - Thank you so much for reporting this bug!

Comment 9

[Flore Allemandou [:flore]]

Thank you so much :jbuck for having solved this issue so quickly :)