Menu Links stopped working after joomla upgrade

[sams]

I have a Fabrik Install that I upgraded to the most recent version on Github (3.8.1) everything was working. Than I upgraded Joomla from 3.6.x to the most current version 3.8.6 and Fabrik opens fine in the backend, however all my links on the front end (including one that I created new just for testing) give me the following error every time.

0 Error decoding JSON data: unexpected end of data
(redacted info in path)/public_html/libraries/vendor/joomla/registry/src/Format/Json.php:72

I am running on a VPS with PHP 5.5.9 and MySQL 5.7.20

There are only 3 packages running on the Joomla System that I have installed. Acymailing Enterprise, Maximenu (I updated and disabled and it made no difference) and Fabrik.

And insight would be helpful as I really would prefer not to down grade my Joomla install.

 

[cheesegrits]

The only way I know of to debug that one is modify the Joomla src to show you the actual JSON it was trying to deocde. So at the line in the file references in the error, change ...

            throw new \RuntimeException(sprintf('Error decoding JSON data: %s', json_last_error_msg()));

... to ...

            throw new \RuntimeException(sprintf('Error decoding JSON data: %s: %s', json_last_error_msg(), $data));

That should give us a clue as to what params it is decoding when it blows up.

-- hugh

 

[sams]

I changed that line in the Json.php and it doesn't appear to report anything different to me.

 

[cheesegrits]

See this thread for an explanation of what is happening, and advice to do the same thing I advised:

https://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?t=937036

The problem is that prior to 3.6, if the 'params' in a table were malformed (invalid JSON format), J! would just silently ignore the error. As of 3.6, it now treats it as a fatal error, and throws that error message.

And debugging it is very difficult, because the error gives no indication about what field in what table is causing the problem.

Is it all your menu links, or only Fabrik ones?

-- hugh

 

[sams]

Just Fabrik. I read through the fix(es) on the forum link and it looks to be an error with syntax error on some of the data. I also found some errors on the acymailing, but I have a fix for those that I have not implemented yet. Somewhere in one of the upgrades it appears that there are some escape characters that were thrown into the data and some "". If were better at mySQL I would write an update to correct them.

I did find a tool that shows the errors. If you would like to see it I will send you a link to the site as well as a login. I'm a little hesitant to post the address on the forum as it is a private membership site.

Sorry about the delay in getting back to you on this. Had a rough weekend, some Friends had an entire family killed by poison gas in Mexico and it through a bit of a wrench in my computer time.

 

[sams]

I fixed the first issue by going through and deleting the Params data in the problematic records. I used this tool https://www.robertwent.com/blog/fixing-json-data-errors-after-updating-to-joomla-3-6-3/ to find the problem rows in the data and then simply deleted the params data in these rows. That may not be the best solution, but it worked.

I am having another issue with pdf conversion, but I suspect that it is a permissions issue. If need be I will start a new thread on that one s it is a different type of issue than this one that is now solved.

Thank you so much for you help Hugh, you are the BEST!

 

[cheesegrits]

Thanks for the link to that tool, I hadn't seen that before. Very useful.

-- hugh