Actinic always downloads orders before uploading

[Jan]

I have a V11 site with stock control set to stock monitoring, order tracking switched off, customer accounts switched off but whenever I upload my site, it downloads orders first. I don't think it should be doing this. I have triple checked and can't see any settings that would require synchronisation.

Regards,

[Steve G Griggs]

Yes I have found this too Jan, and as we split our ordering and catalogue maintenance across two PC's it caused minor chaos until I realised what was going on.
It's not dependent on stock control or anything like that as AFAIK.
We thought we were losing orders, but they were being auto-downloaded to the wrong PC. I had a few nightmares about hackers and nasty bugs in Actinic till I figured it out.
The solution is to disable the order processing tabs on the catalogue PC if you want to split orders/catalogue work across two PC's.
I'm not sure if it's intentional or not, but if it was intentional, some sort of pop-up message at the time along the lines of "Actinic is will now download any outstanding orders before uploading- do you wish to continue?" would have helped.

[Jan]

Thanks Steve - it is perhaps a more serious problem than I thought in that case - I had seen it as annoying but in fact it can have nasty side effects as you have found.

Regards,

[brucet]

This is done to ensure that Publish to Web and Refresh always include up to date information about orders, single use coupon redemption, customer account additions and changes, and stock levels. I can see how it could cause an issue in the present case, and it might be fairly simple to allow auto order download to be disabled. But there would be a risk of data getting permanently out of sync between the web site and the desktop. Figuring out how to prevent that may be quite a complex task.

[Jan]

I can see your point but not all sites use those features - the one I'm working with uses none of them.

Aslo If it is always going to download first, perhaps it should be renamed download and upload so that it's clear what it is doing and perhaps also to avoid issues like the one above.

Regards,

[Steve G Griggs]

Now I know about it I'm quite happy to work round it, but having no obvious warning about it (I didn't notice any mention in the release notes- but I may have missed it) gave us quite a scare thinking we had lost an entire days orders in cyberspace. Especially as I had turned off order processing on the machine that did the dirty deed, and we don't use the online stock facility anyway.
Could it not be arranged by that if the online stock is turned off, and order processing is disabled then Actinic doesn't download the orders by default?
But surely a little pop-up warning that gives you the option to stop and make sure your order processing PC has downoaded the latest orders would be fairly easy to include, and be a sanity check before you commit to uploading? I would have been quite happy with that.

[Jan]

This is still happening but I have been advised by support that it is a bug and will be fixed. It happens in V11.0.3 still but not sure about v2013.

[Ghome1971]

This is a very annoying problem and yes it does happen on V13 with no warning. I thought orders were just vanishing every time I uploaded. It took me a while to find this thread as I was searching on orders being lost on upload. I must have lost quite a few orders as each time I upload I have to take a snapshot and load it into my other laptop as I have never been able to upload of my main PC. So each time I write over the past snapshot losing any previous orders downloaded without my knowledge. I had no idea the laptop was downloading orders!

[Jan]

The solution is to disable the order processing tabs on the catalogue PC if you want to split orders/catalogue work across two PC's.
.

Steve posted a workaround, would that help you out?

Regards,

[DaveSMR]

I had a similar problem and have been advised to go Design > Designer Options (note not Design Options) and uncheck "Order download is enabled".

Not sure if this works yet as not had a chance to test but I thought it might be worth noting.

[peblaco]

That option greys out "Retrieve Orders" it also stops automatic download when uploading. If putting it onto another computer you would have to remember to disable / re-enable downloading.

[leehack]

Just adding a link to another post about this - http://community.sellerdeck.com/showthread.php?t=55363

[mash]

This is a very annoying problem and yes it does happen on V13 with no warning. I thought orders were just vanishing every time I uploaded. It took me a while to find this thread as I was searching on orders being lost on upload. I must have lost quite a few orders as each time I upload I have to take a snapshot and load it into my other laptop as I have never been able to upload of my main PC. So each time I write over the past snapshot losing any previous orders downloaded without my knowledge. I had no idea the laptop was downloading orders!

Hi Ghome1971, does your site use customer accounts, installing snapshots really messes up the account sequence. I can't remember the details but we use to use a laptop to do the content and upload. Desktop for orders (couldn't at the time upload from that machine now sorted) so we managed it all from that machine now.

Just be careful if you use accounts, have a search as I think I posted a question about it.

That is all I wanted to say, thanks M