importing unrecognized excel binary file formats create an ugly scene

Closing ticket per Mike's QA results.

Attaching screenshots from testing as well as "bad" XLS 5 file

Testing on smartsite-dev.ucdavis.edu on firefox 5.0 for linux using site 180d955d-522e-492d-a6d9-f34f1b2d8c7b

Note: Importing OK as below means it passes the first import step, not that a full import cycle was performed.

Going to try various input files, all files will be renamed to import.xls

The following files are based off of real input data generated and modified by either MS Excel or LibreOffice

• XLSX (Generated by MS Excel 2011 on Mac) - imports OK - OK

• XLS 5.0 / 95 (Generated by MS Excel 2011 on Mac) - imports OK - OK (Note: I expected an error, but it seems that POI accepts this file type. Since there was no stack trace or ugly scene this is considered OK)

• XLS 5.0 (Generated by LibreOffice 3.3.2 on Linux) - Received what I call ugly scene - NOT OK

• XLS 95.0 (Generated by LibreOffice 3.3.2 on Linux) - Received what I call ugly scene - NOT OK

• DIF (Generated by MS Excel 2011 on Mac) - Received message Format not recognized but message disappeared quite quickly and left me with blank screen (see screenshot)

The following files are off the wall:

• Random Data - Generated by dd on linux and renamed to XLS - ) - Received message Format not recognized but message did not disappear for quite awhile- OK

• PDF file - Obtained via email - - Received message Format not recognized but message did not disappear for quite awhile- OK

Overall conclusions:

• We do not support OpenOffice/LibreOffice (OO/LO) changing the format.

• The notification window can sometimes disappear quite quickly, and I'm unsure why/how this happens. I'd recommend either forcing the notification to persist until the return button is pressed or making the notification part of the static page.

• The OO/LO problem files exhibit the same behavior on 1.5 (current UCD prod) so I don't see this failure as being a blocker.

• The overall behavior change seems positive to me.

The two issues found above are documented in and

• fixed the import controller/servlet/bean's handling of errors by creating empty Upload objects with hasErrors() == true

• client-side uses notificiation events instead of placing text right on the errorContainer

• removed a unnecessary 2nd call to getGradebook in componentserviceimpl

• externalized/i15d some strings related to import controller on client and server