Bug in reusing assignments

[sigged]

Hi everyone,

We are trying to adapt our workflow to embrace the new assignment creation. Because we need multiple copies of the same assignment, we are considering "reuse assignment".
However, this seems broken now. After selecting a different classroom and clicking "Reuse", we get the following error: "Unexpected token '<', "<!doctype "... is not valid JSON"

Update: reusing seems to work fine when selection a different organisation. But that won't do for our workflow.

[MiguelCardoso19]

Try clearing your browser cache or using a different browser. If that doesn’t help, you may need to manually duplicate the assignment until GitHub fixes the issue. If the problem persists, contacting GitHub Support is your best option.

[sigged]

Cleared cache and used a different browser.

Seems like the issue is caused by a 404. When clicking "Reuse", a GET request is issued to the future location of the cloned assignment, which, at this point does not exist yet. I will try GitHub support.

[Shakattack76]

Ty

[slovak-edhouse]

Hi all, I have also problem with assignment reuse in GitHub classroom. Reuse of assignments is not working, but I get different error: "JSON.parse: unexpected character at line 1 column 1 of the JSON data".

I try different browsers (FF and Chrome) with the same result.

[nimonian]

Exact same problem here, thought I was losing my mind as it was working recently. A bug must have been introduced by a recent update.

I agree with @sigged that the problem occurs because a GET request is being made to the (as yet uncreated) target assignment URL.

This is a pretty significant issue for us as we have a cohort starting very soon.

[Ujoa]

Agreed. Encountering this now after returning from Tuesday's fiasco of classrooms failing. Seems like website is still unstable and this is concerning.

[nimonian]

I found out what the issue is.

If you try to reuse an assignment into a classroom within the same organisation, it will fail.

If you reuse an assignment into a classroom in a different organisation, it will succeed.

It seems like Github are trying to force us to use "one classroom per org" which is not how we use it, and I imagine there are many people who have many classrooms per org and want to reuse assignments between them.

[beak85]

Same issue with one of my assignments. I then tried with another similar assignment and it worked fine. Went back to the first and still the same error. I wonder if there is something within the assignment repo that causes it. I used the same settings in each assignment except for the name and starting repo.

[Ujoa]

@github-staff this issue is still occurring.

[Ujoa]

After clearing cache and browser, as suggested above, the issue is still occurring. Here's a network log (hopefully this helps)

[nimonian]

I found out what the issue is.

If you try to reuse an assignment into a classroom within the same organisation, it will fail.

If you reuse an assignment into a classroom in a different organisation, it will succeed.

It seems like Github are trying to force us to use "one classroom per org" which is not how we use it, and I imagine there are many people who have many classrooms per org and want to reuse assignments between them.

[nimonian]

Oh it gets better

So the assignment has stalled at being created in the separate org

And the base repo has been duplicated FIVE TIMES in the target organisation with a random id added to the slug

I'm... at the point of giving up

[Ujoa]

yeah looks like assignment reuse is not feasible anymore. when it used to work.

[sierrajulietromeo]

Any news on this? Still not working as of yesterday.

[khammami]

I am experiencing the same issue when you try to reuse one assignment. It appears to be related to the new method GitHub Classroom uses to create assignments with starter code. The process requires a public template to create a copy under your organization. However, this copy is just a normal repository and not a template, and it can be private if you change the assignment's visibility. Therefore, when we use the 'reuse' feature, it likely checks if the starter code is a public template, causing it to fail.

update:

Here is what I get when I try to use the copied repo from a previous assignment in a new assignment

[scmurdock]

You are correct! This solved our issue, thank you so much. We can't say how much time it will save our school.

[khammami]

I'm glad to hear that :)

[tturin1017]

I am new to github classrooms so my apologies for not understanding. Are you saying that in order for the reuse assignment feature to work, we must have our starter code be from a private template? I thought a starter template could not only be public.
Thank you! @khammami

[saniales]

Just want to point out that this is still not working and same error keep appearing as everyone else here

[vindiarputra]

The error Unexpected token '<', "<!doctype "... is not valid JSON indicates that the application is receiving an HTML response instead of the expected JSON. This typically happens when:

1. The server redirects to an HTML error page, such as a "Not Found" (404) or "Unauthorized" (401) page.
2. There’s a misconfiguration in the API request, such as an incorrect endpoint or missing/invalid headers.
3. The user's session has expired, causing the server to return an HTML login page instead of the expected JSON response.
4. Middleware logic has an issue, which can result in improper handling of the request.

[tturin1017]

Hi, I believe I have seen this reponse before. Unfortunately, I am not able to solve the issue with it.

[brantfaircloth]

The @github support for critical issues this like this one is woefully inadequate. This bug continues to impact re-using assignments (something that is pretty critical to the operation of a classroom) with no suggestions/fixes from @github...

Similar to others, I am also stuck with the Unexpected token error when attempting to re-use an assignment.