[Plugin: WP-Table Reloaded] Cannot save changes for big table

Hi,

that’s weird.

I just imported your table onto my local test machine and everything works fine. I was able to make changes and everything saved fine.

How did you get to those 91 rows/7 colums? Did you add them all together or one by one? Is there any constellation where saving works?

What do you mean with “It used to work before?”. In a previous WP-Table Reloaded version?
Has maybe something on your server changed? Has your webhoster upgraded the server or PHP versions?

I’ve heard of a this issue before, there the problem was due to a server configuration issue: The server had the “Suhosin” security add-on installed, which limits the number of variables that can be passed in a “POST” request (and thus the number of input fields, one can use on a page).
Can you create a php file with the call phpinfo(); in it and check if the “Suhosin” add-on is installed?

If all of this does not help, please contact me via email (my address is in the plugin file wp-table-reloaded.php in the Copyright notice).

Regards,
Tobias

Hi Tobias,

yes, the “Suhosin” security add-on is installed on the server:

“This server is protected with the Suhosin Extension 0.9.27”
See for yourself: https://94.229.70.183/~diekurve/phpinfo.php

How should I proceed? Should I ask the host to change my number of variables to a bigger number or is there some other solution for this problem?

Thanks,
Nils

Hi,

ok, I just checked. It’s the fault of the Suhosin extension.

What it does: It limits the number of elements in an array to 64 (the value “suhosin.post.max_array_index_length” in your phpinfo.php).
In my plugin, every row basically is such an array element. This means: With Suhosin enabled with this value, you will not be able to Edit table with more than 64 rows.

Yes, please ask your host to set this value higher. (Actually the values “suhosin.post.max_array_index_length” or “suhosin.request.max_array_index_length” need to be set higher. Might be some others too, I don’t really know.)
There also might be a possibility to do this yourself with a .htaccess file. Unfortunately I can’t help with this, as I’m not familiar with that topic (and luckily Suhosin is not installed on my server.)

Sorry for the inconvenience, but there’s nothing that I can do within the plugin to circumvent this ??

Best wishes!
Tobias

Hi Tobias,

I have now disabled the suhosin extension using my php.ini file. Before I tried changing any value to a very high number, which did not work as well.

When it comes to saving, I found out that I cannot have more than 35 rows x 5 columns. After that I cannot save the table anymore. When I click on “save changes”, it will not show the “Settings saved” message, but go back to the list of tables page.

I pretty much tried everything, but nothing seems to work ??

Nils

Hi,

ok, this gets even more weird then.

Can you contact me via email? My address is on https://tobias.baethge.com/imprint/.

Thanks!
Tobias

Ok, the solution to this problem was the following:

Write a php.ini file into the wp-admin folder (php.ini was in the root folder, but this did not help) and remove the following line from it:
extension=”suhosin.so”

This deactivates the Suhosin extension, which obviously messes around with the wp-table reloaded plugin.

Thanks again Tobias for his help and I hope somebody else saves some time, by reading this topic…

Update:

Both php.ini files, the one in the root folder AND the one in wp-admin need to have this Suhosin plugin removed, so delete this line:
extension=”suhosin.so”

Hi,

thanks for posting the solution:

Just a quick note:
The “Suhosin” extension is a security addon to PHP. It (by default) limits arrays that are passed to a PHP script to 64 elements.
As arrays are the used data structure in WP-Table Reloaded, the data get’s messed up by this, if one has more than a certain number of rows in a table (oddly, the number of rows varies).

Tobias

So is it only each row that is counted as an array? Or do columns come into the equation also?

The reason for asking is that I have a table with 6 columns x 20 rows and have an intermittent problem with the table saving.

I’ve found that I can only edit one row at a time before saving. I had initially put data into around 10 rows x 6 columns then when I tried to save it failed and I lost my work.

Can you please clarify?

Also, what are the server security implications of removing the Suhosin extension as per the above fix?

Ok to add to this, I cannot save any changes to “Table Styling Options” either. I have selected the tickboxes next to “Alternating row colors:” and “Table head:” but when Update Changes is clicked the changes are not applied.

Also, any custom CSS relating to colour doesn’t appear to be working, although the CSS to align text is ok.

“Swap Rows” also is not working.

WP v2.8.6 btw.

Hi,

thanks for your comments.

From your descriptions, it really sounds that you are also hit by the “Suhosin” problem.

I don’t know exactly how it works, or what exactly it filters.
WP-Table Reloaded works like this:
A table is a two-dimensional array, i.e. an array of rows, and each row is again an array of cells.
They are named in standard PHP/HTML notation, like
cell[2][4] (which would be the third row, fifth column, as the counting is zero-based).
Each cell has its own textfield, and all textfields’ contents are send to the PHP script with a HTTP POST request.
Before they reach the script though, the Suhosin extension seems to remove some of the variables to limit their number.
The checkboxes basically work the same way and therefore are affected, too.

You could try to increase the limits of Suhosin, or disable it temporarily to test.
I don’t know what other implicatations this could have on your server though. Depending on the server configuration it might be important — or pretty useless.

Best wishes,
Tobias

Hi Tobias,

Thanks for the reply. It was indeed the Suhosin extension causing all of my above problems, we managed a workaround and all is working again.

Thanks for a great plugin and excellent support.

Hi,

sure, you are welcome! ??

And thanks for confirming that Suhosin was the reason for the trouble!

Regards,
Tobias

Hi,

I just ran into the same error. When checking the syslog I saw this event every time I tried to edit a large table:

Mar 4 17:09:22 *servername* suhosin[6974]: ALERT – configured POST variable limit exceeded – dropped variable ‘table[data][48][0]’ (attacker ’88.*.*.*’, file ‘/path/to/wp-admin/tools.php’)

So obviously this is a “problem” (well, not really a problem) with suhosin. What I did was edit the file /etc/php5/apache2/conf.d/suhosin.ini (Debian Lenny). I set the values for

suhosin.post.max_vars
suhosin.request.max_vars

to a higher value and now everything works as expected ??

Thanks for the great plugin, Tobias! ??