How to recover from "Something went wrong, the Map Journal did not load correctly."

peterNOTMEknoop · ‎04-09-2015

I have a class using Story Maps for a group project, both Map Tours and Map Journals. A couple of the students have reached a point with adding content to Map Journals where they are now failing to open. The error displayed when trying to view or edit their Map Journal is, "Something went wrong, the Map Journal did not load correctly." Is there any way to recover from this error, without having the students start over with a new map?

I've checked the permissions on the maps, and the Map Journal is shared publicly. If the Map Journal incorporates other Story Maps, or other web maps, I've verified that they are all shared publicly. I've tried copying the map with the ArcGIS Online Assistant, and that copy fails the same way.

Is there someplace to look for more information on what is causing the error? Is there something one can edit in the Map Journal's JSON (via ArcGIS Online Assistant) to remove whatever is causing the error?

Here is the URL for one of the problematic Map Journals:

http://umich.maps.arcgis.com/apps/MapJournal/?appid=cfb7b67614d54c09803b850ee90937d0

Thanks!

-peter

peterNOTMEknoop · ‎04-09-2015

I was able to get the above Map Journal working by using the ArcGIS Online Assistant to delete the last section the student had added to the map. To delete that section I removed:

{
"title": ...

...

    "contentActions": [],
    "creaDate": 1428554887286,
    "pubDate": 1428554887286,
    "status": "PUBLISHED",
    "media": {
      "type": "video",
      "video": {
        "url": "//www.youtube.com/embed/21OXQ4m1-Bo?wmode=opaque",
        "type": "video",
        "display": "fit"
      }
    }
}

This was the last section in the Map Journal, so there was no comma after the final brace above. If I was removing an earlier section, then I suppose the comma would need to go as well.

View solution in original post

peterNOTMEknoop · ‎04-09-2015

I was able to get the above Map Journal working by using the ArcGIS Online Assistant to delete the last section the student had added to the map. To delete that section I removed:

{
"title": ...

...

    "contentActions": [],
    "creaDate": 1428554887286,
    "pubDate": 1428554887286,
    "status": "PUBLISHED",
    "media": {
      "type": "video",
      "video": {
        "url": "//www.youtube.com/embed/21OXQ4m1-Bo?wmode=opaque",
        "type": "video",
        "display": "fit"
      }
    }
}

This was the last section in the Map Journal, so there was no comma after the final brace above. If I was removing an earlier section, then I suppose the comma would need to go as well.

peterNOTMEknoop · ‎04-09-2015

I left a copy of the original problematic Map Journal at:

http://umich.maps.arcgis.com/apps/MapJournal/?appid=f5adefea12414083b8b75a337c2edd62

If that helps you troubleshoot where the builder is letting the user go wrong.

Thanks.

-peter

GregoryL_Azou · ‎04-09-2015

Hi Peter,

Glad you fixed your issue.

The builder should not have let you paste content that break your Journal.

The content that you pasted seems to come from word and is full of markup that does not make it easy to find the source of the issue. I will investigate more. Thanks for letting your Journal up, I have copied it for further investigation.

AlanRex1 · ‎06-12-2015

Hi Peter,

Thanks for your helpful post! I've run into this issue with a few users and I just wanted to add a few pieces of information for any future users who may run into this problem.

First, you may have run into an existing bug:

BUG-000085962 - Adding a special character in the Side Panel section in Story Map Journal irrevocably corrupts application.

This bug is specific to text copied into the Story Map Journal side panel. Between the "title" and "contentActions" sections of the JSON is a section titled "content". This section defines the content of the side panel and it is in this section that I've seen characters lead to the error message you were seeing.

Unfortunately, the character that I've seen cause this problem is invisible when viewing the JSON in ArcGIS Online Assistant. In fact, it's invisible in every text editor that I've tested with except Notepad and Notepad++. In Notepad it shows up as a dot (·) and in Notepad++ it shows up as a square (□). So when looking at the "content" section of one effected application we would see the line appear as:

<li>438 - Made up text in text box</li>

But if we copied the text into Notepad or Notepad++ it appeared as:

or

Resolving the issue was easy; we just deleted the special character. The hard part was actually finding the character. I found the best way to do this was just removing the "content" from each section one by one, so that the JSON looked something like:

"title": "Largest Area of Employees\n",
"content": " nothing to see here \n",
"contentActions": [],

and refreshing the application after each one. Once the application showed up, then I knew I'd found the section with the offending character and I just had to copy that section into Notepad++ to find and delete it.

***Very Important Note***

It is incredibly easy to corrupt your application (or any item in ArcGIS Online) by modifying the JSON in ArcGIS Online assistant. I would never suggest doing it except in circumstances (like this) where your application is otherwise completely broken. I would highly suggest making a backup copy of your JSON before you do any editing at all, so that if you do mess anything up you can always just paste in the original copy.

I hope this helps!

AlanRex1 · ‎06-12-2015

I should actually note, when I logged that bug I *thought* it "irrevocably" corrupts the application. As we've found, it's not actually irrevocable...just a bit challenging to sort out.

GregoryL_Azou · ‎06-12-2015

Thanks Alan,

I have been able to reproduce and fix.

The patch will be included in our next release planned on July 9th.

The character causing the issue was actually the same than Peter.