Actinic TEST mode

[malbro]

I recently had a problem on a clients site that leads me to believe that in V10 and V11 there is more to the TEST mode than simply changing the path.

Client sets up live stock control on system and uploads live site (PRODUCTION mode), stock control will not display, and any product with stock control enabled fails to Add to Cart, you just get a blank screen, however on all other products it works fine.

I take a copy of clients snapshot, switch to TEST mode and upload to clients server, test site works fine I can see stock levels and Add to Cart works fine on all products.

I take a copy of clients snapshot, change network settings to use one of my own servers, upload in PRODUCTION mode and site works fine just as it does for client site in TEST mode.

Finally to rule out problems with clients PC, I upload snapshot in PRODUCTION mode to clients web site and it also fails. Checking the communications between browser and host I discover that the stock control script is actually failing to return anything at all, it is timing out.

I know the snapshot is fine because it works on my server and in TEST mode, so that rules out the scripts and the layouts and stock files, I also discover that the stock file on the web site is encrypted. This leads me to suspect that a required module on the Perl installation is missing hence the failure to return stock data, BUT if that is correct why does the clients site work in TEST mode.

The Add to Cart is I believe a red herring as the Perl script for managing the cart also calls the stock system and as this is failing the Add to Cart also fails.

Can anyone throw more light on exactly what is the difference between TEST mode and PRODUCTION mode as I thought it was just the path to the site.

[malbro]

Update

Customer changed to new host and site works in both TEST and PRODUCTION modes.

So to use Stock Control there is an additional hosting requirement, but it appears that in TEST mode the operation with stock control is different to PRODUCTION mode

Any one know what this requirement is??

[Mike Hughes]

No idea what might be causing this. It is odd that it works in test mode but not in production mode. The only thing I can think that might be different for the different modes would be the permissions on the respective directories and files. Are they the same?

Assuming everything else is the same, it might be useful if you can name the host that doesn't work just in case anyone has the same problem.

Mike

[Darren B]

its interesting as i have had problems getting live sites to run when switched to test mode. Uploads fail and just annoying errors that pop up because something with the cgi files did not work properly.

the worst thing is i could not find anything definative