Reports plugin stuck on "In progress"

Omeka Classic Plugins
#1

Hello! Looking for advice about what may be causing the Reports plugin to get stuck on “In Progress” when trying to generate a report. I’m trying this plugin for the first time, with version 2.0.2 of the plugin and version 2.8 of Omeka Classic, and PHP 7.4.

I haven’t been able to find any related error messages in any of my assorted error logs, but maybe someone can point me to exactly where I should be checking?

Looking through related posts I see that the QRcode is deprecated, but I’m having trouble even with the HTML output. I also see it mentioned that there are no plans to update this plugin, so I’m very open to recommendations for alternatives!

I was hoping to use this to create my own custom layouts and generate some printed tables with just a few metadata fields for collection workers to use to pull items from storage, etc. , or even to print box labels. Any ideas of alternative ways to do this?

Thanks for any help anyone can offer!

#2

If some more detail helps, when I first tried to generate an HTML report, I got the error message " * The report cannot be saved. Please check your report storage settings. Make sure that /home/costumeshop/public_html/files/reports is exists and is writeable." at the top of the reports page.

I tried creating that directory myself with the appropriate permissions, and then generating the HTML output again . . . that’s when I get it hanging at “In progress.”

Any ideas, anyone? Maybe @jflatnes ? Very open to alternative approaches . . .

#3

Being on “In Progress” for a very long time generally means that the process hit an error and just wasn’t able to update the status.

Your best bet for logging is probably to have PHP’s CLI log to a file… How many items are you dealing with? Running out of memory for the background process is a decent first guess at what the problem might be, and that would be somewhat dependent on how many items you’re making a report of.

#4

Unfortunately I was never able to get the Reports plugin working. For this particular project I can’t communicate with my hosting provider first hand but through a third party, and it was too much trouble to try to get error reporting working properly for background processes, etc.

But I am happy to report that I did figure out an alternative solution to the particular task we wanted to accomplish with the Reports plugin, creating a custom shortcode plugin: ShortcodeStorageTable (on GitHub). Honestly this likely would have been harder to customize in the Reports plugin anyway, and the shortcode does it really well, and helped me to learn how to make other custom shortcodes as needed.

Just wanted to report back here in case anyone else can benefit from this alternative approach.