diff --git a/app/controllers/exercises_controller.rb b/app/controllers/exercises_controller.rb
index 25f522f3..07bd033d 100644
--- a/app/controllers/exercises_controller.rb
+++ b/app/controllers/exercises_controller.rb
@@ -70,8 +70,9 @@ class ExercisesController < ApplicationController
     begin
       user = user_for_oauth2_request()
       exercise = Exercise.new
-      exercise.from_proforma_xml(request.body.read)
-      exercise.update(:user => user)
+      request_body = request.body.read
+      exercise.from_proforma_xml(request_body)
+      exercise.user = user
       saved = exercise.save
       if saved
         render :text => 'SUCCESS', :status => 200
diff --git a/app/models/exercise.rb b/app/models/exercise.rb
index 9eabb874..1b917ecb 100644
--- a/app/models/exercise.rb
+++ b/app/models/exercise.rb
@@ -109,8 +109,11 @@ class Exercise < ActiveRecord::Base
   def from_proforma_xml(xml_string)
     # how to extract the proforma functionality into a different module in rails?
     xml = Nokogiri::XML(xml_string)
-    self.title = xml.xpath('/root/p:task/p:meta-data/p:title/text()')[0].content
-    self.description = xml.xpath('/root/p:task/p:description/text()')[0].content,
+    xml.collect_namespaces
+    self.attributes = {
+      title: xml.xpath('/root/p:task/p:meta-data/p:title/text()')[0].content,
+      description: xml.xpath('/root/p:task/p:description/text()')[0].content
+    }
     self.execution_environment_id = 1
   end