For us this works:

library(limer) 
options(lime_api = ' yourdomain.nl/index.php/admin/remotecontrol ')

options(lime_username = 'report')
options(lime_password = 'password')
session_key <- get_session_key()

Thanks. So, probably the answer is that remotecontrol works after the 5.3 update.

To rephrase my question above , could someone point me to the configuration(s), which cause the API to return a 500 Internal Server Error?
(while using the same code & LimeSurvey settings and version, it works locally - using a XAMPP server)

Thx!

Sorry, cannot help you here, we never used your way of working.

Tammo

Hi Haris.
In my case the code reported by Tammo (the code normally used to access LimeSurvey) didn't work on the release 5.3 of LimeSurvey.
Looking a bit in detail the implementation of get_session_key reported on github:
github.com/cloudyr/limer/blob/master/R/get_session_key.R
I verified that the problem producing the http 500 error is that the implementation uses the field "admin" in body.json definition, and this field doesn't seem available in versione5.3 (instead it was running in the old version).
Changing the implementation of get_session_key using the field "username", instead, is working:

mm_get_session_key <- function() {
body.json = list(method = "get_session_key",
id = 1,
params = list(username = getOption('lime_username'),
password = getOption('lime_password')))
r <- POST(getOption('lime_api'),
content_type_json(),
body = jsonlite::toJSON(body.json,
auto_unbox = TRUE))
session_key <- as.character(jsonlite::fromJSON(content(r, encoding="utf-8"))$result)
session_cache$session_key <- session_key
return(session_key)
}

Thanks a lot for the info, which actually seems to be specific to the limer implementation.
Looking at the API implementation in application\helpers\remotecontrol\remotecontrol_handle.php, the get_session_key function uses only a username parameter.

The answer is that remotecontrol works correctly with LimeSurvey 5.3.

The solution to my problem was that the requests were not being resolved by the server.  An entry in the hosts file solved the issue.

Sure, but something has changed in Limesurvey, too, because the same code was working in past releases.
I don't know if such a change was documented, but it would be important.

Did you also update your PHP from version 7 to version 8? If so, try loading a fixed limer:
devtools::install_github("Jan-E/limer", force = TRUE)
See my fork of limer at  github.com/Jan-E/limer/ for an explanation. See especially the commit + comment:
[url] github.com/Jan-E/limer/commit/bc807c61fb...376d814e80f126fc796c [/url] 

Please report back if this fixes your problems before I create a pull request for limer.

migliorati wrote:

Sure, but something has changed in Limesurvey, too, because the same code was working in past releases.
I don't know if such a change was documented, but it would be important.
 

Nothing has changed in Limesurvey, but PHP8 is not tolerant for non-existing keys. Probably somewhere in the remotecontrol code PHP8 misses a $username and exits with an error, while PHP7 skips over the error and returns a session_ley to LimeR. Debugging is hard, because the YII framework does not seem to log why the RC2 fails.

Created PR in the limer repo:
github.com/cloudyr/limer/pull/62

Thanks a lot for finding the bug and fixing it. There seems to be no response to that on the main limer branch. My server currently runs on PHP 7.3 and all was fine, but in the future, I will need to use github_install() from devtools to install limer from Jan-E's branch.

See  Please merge PR get_session_key.R: fix PHP 8.1 major flaw #62  now. The PR was finally merged. LimeR is compatible with PHP 7 and PHP 8!

Hi Jane,

I know I'm joining this conversation late, but I'm still hoping for some help or illumination:

I use the R package limer to retrieve survey data via remotecontrol from Limesurvey Cloud. It worked well until early October (must have been LS version 6.2.11 then). Now, running on LS 6.3.6, I get the same error message as reported above when trying to get a session key with get_session_key(): "Error: Argument 'txt' must be a JSON string, URL or file."

I have already tried using your fixed version of limer devtools::install_github("Jan-E/limer", force = TRUE) but this hasn't changed the outcome. I don't know which version of PHP is used by Limesurvey Cloud.

Are others experiencing similar issues? Any thoughts on solutions?

Thanks!
Clemens