Understanding our db issues, bug or ignorance??

[itc]

I've realised whats been the cause of 3 of our db issues.

Sometimes during copy or move operations (unrelated to drag and drop bug) a permutation without a product will get its valid flag set. If the operation is done with multiple items this seem to affect all items.


Once a permutation has the valid flag set and has no product assigned to it it will crash actinc if preview is enabled and the section is selected and also when the section is encountered on upload.


edit: It also crashes if you try to take a snapshot.


I've had a cursory check on 8.52 and it doesn't seem to suffer this problem (although the permutation in question seems to have lost the model name through conversion to v9 becoming 'Any choice').

I don't fully understand whats going on here, but it does seem to be an issue.


Screenshot of the issue

[cdicken]

Rebecca

This does seem like a bug to me, but your permutations are very complicated so I'm having trouble understanding the exact nature of the issue.

Are you saying that a permutation that is set as 'invalid' (and also doesn't have an associated product) in v8 then disappears in the upgrade to 'v9'?

Also in that 'Any Choice' permutation in v9, are you saying that you had it marked as not valid, but when you moved/copied the permutations it ended up being valid? I must admit, I'm not clear why you would need an 'Any Choice' option within your permutations that is set as not valid. I don't think this is a valid option, so that's probably why you get the problem. What is your thinking behind this?

[itc]

Rebecca

This does seem like a bug to me, but your permutations are very complicated so I'm having trouble understanding the exact nature of the issue.

Are you saying that a permutation that is set as 'invalid' (and also doesn't have an associated product) in v8 then disappears in the upgrade to 'v9'?

Also in that 'Any Choice' permutation in v9, are you saying that you had it marked as not valid, but when you moved/copied the permutations it ended up being valid? I must admit, I'm not clear why you would need an 'Any Choice' option within your permutations that is set as not valid. I don't think this is a valid option, so that's probably why you get the problem. What is your thinking behind this?

Hi Chris

Are you saying that a permutation that is set as 'invalid' (and also doesn't have an associated product) in v8 then disappears in the upgrade to 'v9'?

I need to look at this further, but it almost seems as if the invalid one gets renamed to 'any choice' - because 'any choice' isn't present in the original v8 data but there is an invalid one (in the example 'Dell e196f') that subsequently seems to disapear after moving to v9 - question is where did the 'any choice' appear from - is it just the 'Dell e196f' entry that has somehow lost its name or renamed?


Anyway I'm not sure if in the scheme of things this is related to the crash, it maybe just a strange coincidence.

Also in that 'Any Choice' permutation in v9, are you saying that you had it marked as not valid, but when you moved/copied the permutations it ended up being valid?

In a round about way yes, it becomes valid and causes the crashes.

I must admit, I'm not clear why you would need an 'Any Choice' option within your permutations that is set as not valid. I don't think this is a valid option, so that's probably why you get the problem.

I don't actually understand where the 'Any Choice' option has come from because its absent in the original v8 data as far as I can see(see previous explanation).

It isn't valid because the valid flag shouldn't be set, but when it gets set for some arbitary reason (during a copy operation?) that causes crashes it is a problem. It would be bad enough that a user sets a flag like this manually causes a crash, but when the program itself does it for a seemingly unrelated task, that is very irritating.

I realise I can go through the products removing this seemingly unnecessary permutation (and not a little mysterious), but surely it shouldn't cause the issues it does - and shouldn't change its state in an arbitary fashion.

[cdicken]

OK - I THINK the problem is that a permutation you marked as 'invalid' in v8, then incorrectly turned into a 'Any Choice' permutation (makrked as 'valid') when you upgraded to v9. Then this caused a crash.

I'd like to confirm this. If your snapshot is small, could you email it to cdicken /at/ actinic/co/uk. If it's big, email the above address anyway and I'll send you details of where to upload the snapshot to.

[itc]

Thanks for coming back to me chris,

I've gone back to a pre upgrade v8 snap and imported this into v9 to see if it did mess around with the 'dell e196fp' perm. It turns out that it doesn't and it also doesn't crash when I select the valid flag.

[edit: It also doesn't cause problems when changing it manually to 'any choice', so it goes a somewhat deeper than than first appears ]

So I guess that rules out the conversion from v8 to v9 (unless its fundamentally different for an in place upgrade as opposed to importing the snapshot).

That still leaves the 'any choice' and where that appeared from and the 'dell e196fp' and where that disappeared to and also why selecting the valid flag in this instance causes crashes.

When I get a minute I'm going to go back through the v9 snaps looking for the absence of 'any choice' to see if it is disconnected with the copy or move.

The snapshots are between 60 & 70mb so email maybe out of the question.

[cdicken]

OK - well, it's good to eliminate that one possible issue.

I guess the next job is to try and reproduce it in your store and see if you can get a consistent way to show the error happening.

Alternatively, contact Actinic Support and send them the snapshot and show them where the faulty permutation is. They can then show it to the development team who might be able to comment further.