Post by Caps » Mon May 19, 2014 12:35 am

I have reviewed a number of post on problems with the image manager and those with responses demonstrate this module of OC poses a liability to those who was depending on its infrastructure to conduct business.

My personal experience is that if you have constructed folders with subfolder which helps to organize your images/products, then update OC, the database which is built for these folders and subfolders may get corrupt therefore rendering your shop product management, broken. If you have several hundred to several thousands of products, you will have to rebuilt the entire product inventory, which includes: product name, ID, cost, quantity, ratings, manufacturer, description and image. Any comments on the product either by the shop keeper or patrons would have to be recreated. All data relative to the product will have to be reentered.

Unfortunately the problem with this module posses a threat and liability to the OpenCart community and to its future. The impact is so severe, It is no longer a viable shop - e-commerce solution.

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Post by IP_CAM » Mon May 19, 2014 4:56 am

I don't really see your problem. If s Shop Owner depend's on OC-based financial Survival, he/she will make sure, that a competent OC Admin takes care and makes sure, that noone 'unauthorized' will ever get 'near' the Shop-DB from an Admin Screen.

Therefore, in a 'real commercial' Shop environment, NO NEW RLEASE or UPDATE will ever be made on a running online-Shop before beeing tested in a 'secure' test-area. Everything else is hobby-type Doing, likely done by people, dreaming of a bright future, but actually beeing more concerned about financing the short-term obligations.

I know, this sound very hard. But it's not my intention to hurt anyone, I just want to make it clear, possibly, One out of X'000, trying to set up and get, whatever, free Software 'on the Air' will possibly end up successfully. All others will disappear again.

Back to the Point:

If one would 'run' an Auction Place or a Classifieds Software, based on OC, I could understand and fully agree to your concerns, because everyone can upload all kinds of stuff to a server, possibly harming it's functions. But I don't see a REAL Reason for someone to upload anything to my Shop anyway. There are better Places to store such things, if needed...

So, where is your point ? If an OC Update would create, during upload/install, a NEW DB, then, it would/could be a real Problem. But otherways, I just don't see one.

Do you really, then please explain where and why...

Ernie

My Github OC Site: https://github.com/IP-CAM
5'200 + FREE OC Extensions, on the World's largest private Github OC Repository Archive Site.


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Post by labeshops » Mon May 19, 2014 6:56 am

Caps wrote:I have reviewed a number of post on problems with the image manager and those with responses demonstrate this module of OC poses a liability to those who was depending on its infrastructure to conduct business.

My personal experience is that if you have constructed folders with subfolder which helps to organize your images/products, then update OC, the database which is built for these folders and subfolders may get corrupt therefore rendering your shop product management, broken. If you have several hundred to several thousands of products, you will have to rebuilt the entire product inventory, which includes: product name, ID, cost, quantity, ratings, manufacturer, description and image. Any comments on the product either by the shop keeper or patrons would have to be recreated. All data relative to the product will have to be reentered.

Unfortunately the problem with this module posses a threat and liability to the OpenCart community and to its future. The impact is so severe, It is no longer a viable shop - e-commerce solution.
Having done several upgrades, I have never seen an issue with folders/subfolders becoming corrupt. The only problems I've seen reported are people changing servers and failing to properly edit the config files to reflect the new path information. And as anyone doing an upgrade *should* do a backup first as is always recommended, restoration of the backup is always an option to something that somehow messes things ups. Product tables can easily be re-imported from a backup as well, so really not seeing this huge issue you say makes opencart unusable.

I am really confused about your point - are you saying there is some security issue or some problem with people not following directions and properly updating path information??

Running Opencart v3.0.3.2 with multi-stores and the default template from https://www.labeshops.com which has links to all my stores.


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Post by rph » Mon May 19, 2014 8:00 am

I don't think Caps means corrupt as in data loss but that the images have differing paths versus the database. That would cause them to not appear in the storefront. Daniel has talked about changing the system to the DB paths get updated but I don't know if any work has been done yet.

-Ryan


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Post by labeshops » Mon May 19, 2014 11:11 am

rph wrote:I don't think Caps means corrupt as in data loss but that the images have differing paths versus the database. That would cause them to not appear in the storefront. Daniel has talked about changing the system to the DB paths get updated but I don't know if any work has been done yet.
But isn't this really a user error? If the user decides to change the structure of folders after the fact, it's certainly not a problem with opencart. If you structure the folders the same way you did originally, there would be no issue with the paths. And it would really just be a matter of correcting them within the database at that - it could be tedious if you have a lot of images, but certainly not undoable.

Running Opencart v3.0.3.2 with multi-stores and the default template from https://www.labeshops.com which has links to all my stores.


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Post by rph » Tue May 20, 2014 4:58 am

It is caused by the user, though some training wheels for this and the recursive directory delete would be a good idea.

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Post by Caps » Fri May 23, 2014 12:01 am

I would like to thank all who have tried to assist in this manner by responding. Let me try to clarify my statements. After an update of OC, the Image Manager folders, created using the Image Manager, were corrupt. If you created for instance:

Products/Jewelry/Earrings
Products/Paintings
Products/Glasswork
Images/logos

and then you update OC, the folders would look like this:

Products/Jewelry/Earrings/Products/Jewelry/Earrings/Products/Jewelry/Earrings/ - to infinity
Products/Paintings/Products/Paintings/Products/Paintings/Products/Paintings/Products/Paintings - to infinity
Products/Glasswork/Products/Glasswork/Products/Glasswork/Products/Glasswork
Images/logos/Images/logos/Images/logos/Images/logos to infinity

Any new image upload does not work only the data survives. The physical structure of these folders utilizing FTP, before and after the update, are good.
  • This has nothing to do with security. The treat has to do with the acceptance of OC as a shop application
  • The admin only has complete control over folder creation. Even if the manager or another authorized individual created a incorrect folder hierarchy, the data base which the image manager generates should not get trashed upon an OC update
  • I maintain that the Image Manager potentially presents troubles and may not only destroy the image, but also the database part of which the Image Manager controls
  • This is not an isolated case, there are others who have had the same problem, created a post on this forum and there were no viable solutions. You are left with having to rebuild the OC Image with image data.
  • About utilizing a backup copy to restore: If the problem resulted in an OC update, then the updated OC database structure is incompatible with the backup version. So you would have to roll back to an earlier version of OC to make use of the backup database.

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Post by labeshops » Fri May 23, 2014 4:20 am

Updating from what version to what version? I've done several updates, most recently from 1.5.2 to 1.5.6.4 and never had this problem. Of course you should always make a complete backup of both your database and files before you upgrade just in case which would give you a version very easy to roll back to if needed.

You should be able to simply restore the image table, product_image, from your backup to correct the problem after first making sure the image path in your config files are correct.

The upgrade script does not change data within the tables at all as far as I know - it may make some changes to the database structure (add fields/tables/etc), but doesn't change the existing data in the fields.

If something happened that the fields were corrected, you should be able to restore the version you backed up and re-run the upgrade script on it very easily.

Running Opencart v3.0.3.2 with multi-stores and the default template from https://www.labeshops.com which has links to all my stores.


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Post by Caps » Fri May 23, 2014 4:36 am

I believe it was 1.5.1 that was working, then upon upgrading the folders for the images got corrupted. The fact is I am not alone, there are other post similar to my problem with the Image Manager with responses that give little in the way of a solution other than rebuilding the products info and images. You can not just restore unless you re-install an earlier version of OC to match the backup database.

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Post by rph » Fri May 23, 2014 4:46 am

Can you post steps to reproduce the issue? As labeshops pointed out OpenCart upgrades do not affect images, image directories, and image entries in the database. Users themselves can cause images to stop appearing by renaming directories but this is an operator error rather than an issue caused by OpenCart. Renaming the directory back or updating the product image paths will resolve the issue.

-Ryan


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Post by Caps » Fri May 23, 2014 10:16 pm

Hi Ryan and again thank you for trying to resolve this matter. You have failed to read the folder structure which I provided in my last post. An operator renaming a folder should not result in the total combobulation of folder structure and access being locked out. Possibly in the land of OC this happens but not standard practice nor is this "good practice" in PHP script writing. Folder structure is now different on the server than what is seen within the Image Manager.

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Post by rph » Fri May 23, 2014 11:34 pm

You're all over the place here Caps. All this wild speculation and recrimination is not helpful. Just state your OpenCart version and step-by-step how to reproduce the issue.

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Post by Caps » Sat May 24, 2014 12:13 am

All over the place? I have stated conditions of which a user should not be able to corrupt a file system- whatever they did. Renaming or deleting a folder should not be detrimental. If so, than my statement stands, the Image Manager is a threat and liability to the future of OC.

I have also published the file structure after the update and you have ignored that. I will decline your help as you choose to ignore key parts of my post.

Kind regards,

Caps

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Post by rph » Sat May 24, 2014 12:40 am

I don't think those were kind regards at all.

The first issue was discussed. I'm not sure what else you're looking for there. On the regressive directory naming issue you haven't posted any information on OpenCart version or how to reproduce the error so there's no way anyone could assist.

-Ryan


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Post by labeshops » Sat May 24, 2014 1:48 am

Caps wrote:I believe it was 1.5.1 that was working, then upon upgrading the folders for the images got corrupted. The fact is I am not alone, there are other post similar to my problem with the Image Manager with responses that give little in the way of a solution other than rebuilding the products info and images. You can not just restore unless you re-install an earlier version of OC to match the backup database.
As I said, you should always make a copy of the current store files and database before you upgrade. Easiest way to do this is copy your store files into a new folder on your store (like "old-store") and backup the database. If something goes wrong with the upgrade, you can just copy the files from the "old-store" folder back to your opencart installation folder and restore the database. No reinstalling an earlier version of OC required since that are the files you would have backed up in the "old-store" folder. You could also as I said just re-import the single table with your image path back into it.

All the upgrade script (or install script for that matter) does is update the database structure - it doesn't affect the program files which is why you have to upload them separately to your server.

Naturally if you change the image folders and path information you will have to change the path information in your database table - I fail to understand why you think you would not have to. You could easily do a sql query from phpmyadmin on the product-image table to update say path old/path/to/image to /new/path/to/image in one go without having to go thru every product individually though.

Honestly it seems to me your "issues" are simply because you are not familiar with even basic coding or sql, not an issue with opencart.

Running Opencart v3.0.3.2 with multi-stores and the default template from https://www.labeshops.com which has links to all my stores.


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Post by Caps » Sat May 24, 2014 2:39 am

"Naturally if you change the image folders and path information you will have to change the path information in your database table - I fail to understand why you think you would not have to. You could easily do a sql query from phpmyadmin on the product-image table to update say path old/path/to/image to /new/path/to/image in one go without having to go thru every product individually though."

When the script changes the name of a folder or subfolder, the content provider nor the admin has to reassign permissions, the script does that. In other words, a file sharing script does not need a user to perform a permissions for a newly created or modified folder. When these new folders and subs were created, access to them was good, only after the update did this get broken.

Thank you again for your time.

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Post by Caps » Sat May 24, 2014 3:05 am

Problem resolved. The PHP version was toggled from PHP 5.2 to 5.5 then back to 5.2. Again was a result of updating. Folders and subs are all good.

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Post by rph » Sat May 24, 2014 3:42 am

Caps wrote:In other words, a file sharing script does not need a user to perform a permissions for a newly created or modified folder.
This is actually a matter of server configuration.

-Ryan


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