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Changed behaviour in the SOAP API

Gareth WalkerGareth Walker Crackerjack
in API

As recently as in the last 1-2 weeks, passing in the root folder ID ('00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000') as the parent ID into the SOAP API's GetFoldersList command would return information on all the folders in the root of a Panopto site. This also seems consistent with the documented behaviour as a I understand it:

https://support.panopto.com/resource/APIDocumentation/Help/html/93a3f1b2-d5f2-0d2e-25f4-43aebd25109f.htm

I've just run the identical code on Friday 21 July and this now returns nothing. It works fine when I run identical code for any folder other than the root.

What has changed, and was this a planned change or an error that will be resolved?


Posting to the forum as advised in my support request Case 00901502

  • [Recipients: Gareth Walker] Hello Gareth, Thank you for contacting Panopto Support. This query is best suited for our API forum, in which our development team can directly advise on issues and questions: https://community.panopto.com/categories/api As per this email, I will close this case. However if you have any questions or require further assistance, please feel free to reply to re-open.


Answers

  • Gareth WalkerGareth Walker Crackerjack

    Hi -- some feedback on this issue would be helpful. I've reconfirmed I'm still seeing this behaviour with the SOAP API.

    (It doesn't seem to be an issue for the REST API but owing to the gap between SOAP and REST features in Panopto we can only use the SOAP for our end-to-end process.)

  • Vegard WallinVegard Wallin Tyro

    I can also confirm this is still an issue. I asked for help regarding this in another thread (https://community.panopto.com/discussion/1627/root-folder-via-soap , thanks for your code example @Gareth Walker - I never got the SOAP approach to work obviously, so I had to implement REST just to get the contents of the root folder).

    Calling GetFoldersById() and supplying a Guid.Empty (00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000 as suggested in the docs) throws an exception.

  • Kevin BaumKevin Baum Panopto Employee

    Hello Gareth and Vegard,

    I am currently unable to reproduce the issue you are seeing. I called the SOAP API GetFoldersList using the empty GUID for the ParentFolderId parameter and was able to successfully retrieve a list of folders at the root level of the Panopto site.

    Are you sending any other parameters in the request that might be giving you the error or exception that I can use to attempt to reproduce the issue on my end?

    Please let me know if you have any questions.

    Thanks,

    Kevin

  • Gareth WalkerGareth Walker Crackerjack

    Hi Kevin --

    Thanks for your message. I've been in and out over the Summer, so this morning (UK time) has been the first opportunity I've had to revisit this since late-July.

    I've re-tried my original code which has previously successfully extracted a list of folders from the Panopto root folder using the empty GUID until at least early July, and had then stopped working at the time I posted my comment (22 July).

    The identical code is now working just as it did before -- but it definitely stopped working and consistently didn't do so on either our test or live environments when I reported this issue (ie. I tried it multiple times over several days).

    The request I'm sending is indicated in the code below. I'm just passing in '00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000' as the parentid

    image.png

    I can't think how there was anything local to my set-up that could explain things, as everything has been very consistent and we'd not made any changes to either the code, the system I was running it on, or our Panopto test and live environments. I've also not seen a similar issue for c.2 years of using the Soap API in the identical way.

    As the change in behaviour roughly coincided with the aftermath of the Panopto downtimes in Europe that were connected to large scale folder operations, I had wondered whether anything done to mitigate this might have had an unintended impact on the API's behaviour --- but this was pure, uninformed speculation on my part.

    So I guess, long story short, I'm 'good' now unless the same thing crops up again later ... but it's a little bit of a mystery to me!

    I'm not sure if the above helps you @Vegard Wallin --- it sounds like yours may be a slightly different issue. Two thoughts I had reading your comment were:

    • - You specified you were calling GetFoldersByID(). I'm calling GetFoldersList, which is a different request and so might be worth trying if you haven't previously.
    • - Harvard's Panopto-CLI can be worth taking a look at if you want to do some testing/experimentation with the Soap Api. If nothing else, their one-page list of the Soap commands is something I've often found more useful as a quick-reference than the official docs.
  • Vegard WallinVegard Wallin Tyro

    I'm sorry, I specified the wrong method in my previous post, it should read GetFoldersList() (and not GetFoldersById).

    Anyways, it also works for me now. I cannot say for sure what the reason for failure was before, but this time around I fixed it by creating an instance of the Pagination class which I had mysteriously overlooked.

    I find that looking up subfolders using the rest api is speedier, so I will stick with that.

    Thank you for links to that repo @Gareth Walker it looks like a good resource.

    All's well. :)

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