Builder Won't Load with Gravity Form enabled

[nrherron92]

Reproduction Steps

HS-169138

• I cannot reproduce this on trial or local
• With Gravity Forms and LifterLMS enabled attempt to open the Course Builder on a course with a lesson on it (it's on 5.0 but this was happening in 4.X)
• I can get it to open without the gravity forms shortcode on the lesson (you'll see this in the staging site as the one titled clone)
• I can also get it to open with out: title, description and ajax [gravityform id="1" title="false" description="false" ajax="true"]
• However, having these on my trial site doesn't cause any issue

Expected Behavior

• The course builder will open for edits

Actual Behavior

• on BuddyBoss it opens to a 404 page on the front end
• in twenty-twentyone it just loads and loads

Error Messages / Logs

• Include any relevant error messages or log files

System and Environment Information

System Report

Wordpress
-------------------------------------------

Home Url: [removed]
Site Url: [removed]
Login Url: [removed]/wp-login.php
Version: 5.7.2
Debug Mode: Yes
Debug Log: Yes
Debug Display: No
Locale: en_US
Multisite: No
Page For Posts: Blog (#1892) [[removed]/blog/]
Page On Front: Home (#1772) [[removed]/]
Permalink Structure: /%postname%/
Show On Front: page
Wp Cron: Yes


Settings
-------------------------------------------

Version: 5.0.0
Db Version: 5.0.0
Course Catalog: Course Library (#5464) [[removed]/course-library/]
Membership Catalog: Membership Catalog (#2158) [[removed]/memberships/]
Student Dashboard: Dashboard (#4871) [[removed]/dashboard/]
Checkout Page: Registration Welcome and Sign In (#2159) [[removed]/home/choice/purchase/]
Course Catalog Per Page: 10
Course Catalog Sorting: title,ASC
Membership Catalog Per Page: 10
Membership Catalog Sorting: menu_order,ASC
Site Membership: Not Set
Courses Endpoint: my-courses
Edit Endpoint: edit-account
Lost Password Endpoint: lost-password
Vouchers Endpoint: redeem-vouchers
Autogenerate Username: yes
Password Strength Meter: no
Minimum Password Strength: weak
Terms Required: yes
Terms Page: Terms and Conditions (#2304) [[removed]/terms/]
Checkout Names: required
Checkout Address: hidden
Checkout Phone: hidden
Checkout Email Confirmation: no
Open Registration: yes
Registration Names: required
Registration Address: hidden
Registration Phone: hidden
Registration Voucher: optional
Registration Email Confirmation: no
Account Names: required
Account Address: optional
Account Phone: optional
Account Email Confirmation: no
Confirmation Endpoint: confirm-payment
Force Ssl Checkout: no
Country: US
Currency: USD
Currency Position: left
Thousand Separator: ,
Decimal Separator: .
Decimals: 2
Trim Zero Decimals: no
Recurring Payments: no
Email From Address: [removed]
Email From Name: [removed]
Email Footer Text: Your success is our mission. Thanks for joining inBizWorks
Email Header Image: 5337
Cert Bg Width: 800
Cert Bg Height: 600
Cert Legacy Compat: no


Constants
-------------------------------------------

LLMS_REMOVE_ALL_DATA: undefined
LLMS_REST_DISABLE: undefined
LLMS_SITE_FEATURE_RECURRING_PAYMENTS: undefined
LLMS_SITE_IS_CLONE: undefined


Gateways
-------------------------------------------

Manual: Disabled
Manual Logging: no
Manual Order: 1


Server
-------------------------------------------

Mysql Version: 8.0.18
Php Curl: Yes
Php Default Timezone: UTC
Php Fsockopen: Yes
Php Max Input Vars: 1000
Php Max Upload Size: 1,000 MB
Php Memory Limit: 512M
Php Post Max Size: 1000M
Php Soap: Yes
Php Suhosin: No
Php Time Limt: 240
Php Version: 7.3.14
Software: Apache
Wp Memory Limit: 40M


Browser
-------------------------------------------

HTTP USER AGENT: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/91.0.4472.114 Safari/537.36


Theme
-------------------------------------------

Name: Twenty Twenty-One
Version: 1.3
Themeuri: https://wordpress.org/themes/twentytwentyone/
Authoruri: https://wordpress.org/
Template: 
Child Theme: No
Llms Support: No


Plugins
-------------------------------------------

Gravity Forms: 2.5.6
LifterLMS: 5.0.0


Integrations
-------------------------------------------

BbPress: No
BuddyPress: No


Template Overrides
-------------------------------------------

This issue has be recreated:

• [x] Locally
• [X] On a staging site
• [ ] On a production website
• [ ] With only LifterLMS and a default theme

Browser, Device, and Operating System Information

• Browser name and version
• Operating System name and version
• Device name and version (if applicable)

[thomasplevy]

@eri-trabiccolo can you look into this please

[eri-trabiccolo]

@thomasplevy @nrherron92 Alright, after diggin' a little bit too much into this (I exported the infamous course from the user's website - of course disabling gf) I've come up with a partial explanation. The problem is that each of those course's lessons have a lot of post metas, specially because they're built with the beaver builder, and the bb post metas are pretty big. This leads to an apparently infinite load culminating in a timeout (or for some weird reason in a 404).

I said "partial" because I've not been able to find a direct connection between the post metas size and gravityforms, it might just be that it adds overhead?!

I've verified this theory both on the user's staging website and locally by adding this snippet (now removed from the user's staging):

		add_filter(
			'llms_lesson_skip_custom_field',
			function( $bool, $key ) {
				if ( $bool ) {
					return $bool;
				}
				return ( 0 === strpos( $key, '_fl_builder_' ) );
			},
			10,
			2
		);

which leverages this filter: https://github.com/gocodebox/lifterlms/blob/5.0.0/includes/abstracts/abstract.llms.post.model.php#L1644

Ideally we could totally skip the custom fields in the builder (have to verify that our add-ons do not leverage this), although the problem would remain when exporting...

[thomasplevy]

@eri-trabiccolo and I discussed the in's and out's of this complicated case and arrived at the following (none of this set in stone as a proper direction forward)

• Possibly lazy loading lesson data on the builder (like we do with courses)
• Possibly implementing a safelist of custom field data that is loaded within the builder
  • We'd need to coordinate with integrations (themes/plugins) that add data to the builder to ensure the data they rely on gets safelisted. Possibly we can do this automatically using our registration API but we'll need to look into the code to determine if this is true.
• Possibly incrementally loading lessons in the builder (load 1 section and up to 10 lessons at time via AJAX) in favor of loading the entire course synchronously

None of the above resolves issues that will also be encountered during course exports, to resolve export issues we're going to have to adopt a strategy of incrementally exporting courses:

• Trigger an async request that builds the course in the background (similar to CSV exports of student reporting data)
• Build a course skeleton object (with no children) and store it in a temporary json file
• Push sections into the course one at a time using the async processor functionality to ensure we don't timeout
• Loop through sections, pushing lessons into each section one at a time and then lesson children into the lesson
• When the export is completed prompt the user to download and then delete the temporary file

Seems time consuming but for courses that don't time out today there would be more or less no difference in time (more than likely) and larger courses that do time out won't have that problem

To resolve the immediate customer issue a patch can be provided to exclude the offending data (right now _fl_builder_* data (from beaver builder) which is absolutely unneeded. This won't resolve export issues but at the moment I don't think the affected user is worried about exports.

[nrherron92]

@eri-trabiccolo @thomasplevy thanks! I followed up with the user!