FIRST

are you asking to add a loop that will retry the search if there is a failure?
I've actually never experienced a hiccup with this service - though I know it has to get bogged down or even go down sometimes.
How often are you experiencing difficulties?

(In reply to comment #1)

I have not encountered this error personally, but a couple of undergrads
who are working on adding metadata to a number of assessments have
encountered multiple times (in fact, showed it to us). But, I should add that
the warning/error pops-up during potentially busy time in terms of network
traffic or slow network (such as weak wireless signal). So, Mark wondered
if the timeout time could be extended to get over the problem.

are you asking to add a loop that will retry the search if there is a failure?
I've actually never experienced a hiccup with this service - though I know it
has to get bogged down or even go down sometimes.
How often are you experiencing difficulties?

The students who report this report that it happens sometimes. Most recently during early afternoon in wireless classrooms, or other situations that may have bandwidth/server load issues. This afternoon, one of the students used it with no problems for about an hour before the message popped up, but it only happened once. Other than that, it was very responsive. However, this was after 4 PM and in a non-public wireless network in Diane's office, as opposed to 2 PM in a large lecture classroom with 400 students, many of whom were on the wireless network, where she reports that it happened on each question. Each time it happens, she reports that she had to close morpho and restart to make it work. She reports that it always works for the first question, but if she gets the error and keeps trying without quitting/restarting morpho, it won't work.

Feels like a network load/timeout/retry issue. If there are timeout parameters, making them larger to see what happens or else trapping the error and doing a retry might be useful.

I asked her to keep a log of when/where this happens, but we can't reproduce it more reliably at this time.

1. At what point in the process is the error box popping up? I am assuming it is when you enter a search term and search the service. Correct?
2. What is the actual error message?
3. After dismissing the error message, it sounds like you can still navigate around Morpho but that the search never works? This is perplexing, but hopefully we'll shed some light on it shortly.

(In reply to comment #4)

1. At what point in the process is the error box popping up? I am assuming it
is when you enter a search term and search the service. Correct?

Yes.

2. What is the actual error message?

Unable to load vocabulary:nbii

3. After dismissing the error message, it sounds like you can still navigate
around Morpho but that the search never works?

That's my understanding. She reports that once she gets the message, if she tries searching again w/o restarting morpho, she gets the error again.

This is perplexing, but
hopefully we'll shed some light on it shortly.

In the code, I only see an error message like the one you have phrased as:
"Could not load vocabulary: nbii"
This should only appear if there is a problem loading the NBII search page - somethien that happens before any searching is performed. I don't think it's an NBII or traffic error since the webservice is not being invoked at this point.
I know you said it was when you "searched for a term" - but that doesn't make sense based on what I see. I think it could show up if you were trying to "Add" a term that came from the 'nbii' vocab (one step before searching)

I just tried a search for 'DNA' - and while it was a bit slow, it did connect with NBII correctly and I was able to selected a related term for my keyword selection.
I'm reducing the severity of this bug as it does not seem to be universally blocking.

Original Bugzilla ID was 4861