We could not find a record for experiment designer: undefined

Online experiments
1

URL: https://pavlovia.org/hekragness/ratingvideos

The experiment presents a series of short videos and asks participants to rate them using the slider. I previously uploaded a version of this experiment that mostly worked, but Pavlovia failed to play videos sometimes (blank screen instead of video, no error message came up, and the experiment proceeded as if the video had actually played). This was seemingly random - sometimes all videos played fine, and we didn’t notice any pattern in which failed to play on occasion.

I decided to start from scratch, deleted the old experiment, and try to re-upload as a new project. Now, no matter what I do, I get the same message when trying to launch a pilot:

"We could not find a record for experiment designer: undefined

Please check the name and try again. If the error persists, contact Pavlovia’s administrator."

I know others have written about this error message but none of the previous solutions appear to apply.

Thanks!

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2

I was also having this issue when trying to upload a task involving videos. I think the issue for me was that the project failed to convert from inactive to piloting initially, as it didn’t redirect the page as it normally does.
What ended up working for me was I removed most of the videos from the routine (they are listed in a spreadsheet as part of a loop) to make the experiment smaller. This allowed the experiment to properly convert to piloting mode and it fixed the error you are getting. Then I just added more videos by re-entering them into the Excel file with each new commit. I also compressed the file sizes but I’m not totally sure if this was necessary.

4

Thanks, Kate! The experiment now works although it is a rather unsatisfying conclusion. You are definitely right that it was an issue converting properly to piloting mode - I had the same fail-to-redirect that you describe. I initially tried removing all but one video from the routine, but the project rejected pilot mode no matter what - even when I removed ALL videos.

What ultimately worked was re-building the entire experiment from the beginning (copying/pasting any part of the root folder seemed to retain the same issue) and subsequently adding videos one by one with each new commit (as you did). So not sure what the specific issue was, but at least it’s working now. Thanks for your advice!

1 Like