Bizarre Add-to-Order Error

[nacotton]

Dear all,

We operate a small website to allow independent mens clothing retailers to order from our range of ties, scarves, dressing gowns, etc.

www.lloydattreeandsmith.com

(Please feel free to use my username ncot and my password 0709 to look through the site)

In the past few days the site has (seemingly of its own accord - seems unlikely?!) developed an odd quirk. In the past, you could put quantities against several different items on the same page and then click the big green "add selected items to order" button to do exactly that. This allows, for example, a retailer to look at a large range of silk ties on a single page and pick out a balanced selection for their store. NOW, the website will only let you add a single product at a time. That is, if you want to add a quantity of 6 of a particular tie to the order at once, that's fine, but if you want to add 1 each of 6 different designs, then ca000001.pl returns an "HTTP 500 Internal Server Error: The Website Cannot Display The Page" error.

Any help understanding why this is happening - and what we can possibly have done to make it start happening now after two years' problem-free operation - would be VERY gratefully received.

(As far as I am aware, we haven't changed any settings, or page or fragment or layout code at all for many months...!)

Many thanks in advance,

Neill.

[leehack]

You mode of shopping has been changed, it sounds as if you had the 'single add to cart option' being used, you can set this either globally if for all pages or more likely you will have set it on the section itself. Select the section and check the shopping mode deployed, it has probably changed by mistake or an errant click.

[RuralWeb]

Also check with your hosts to see if they have done anything to the server

[Darren B]

do a full site refresh would be a good idea, and changing the script id number seems to force actinic to refresh the scripts online.

Possibly something has got corrupted somewhere, it happens sometimes

[nacotton]

OK... first of all, a huge THANK YOU to you all for your suggestions.

I have reloaded everything with a different script id suffix, and have checked every section is correctly set up for "Single Add to Cart Button"...

No improvement at all.

The only additional nugget of information I can add is that, on one occasion, instead of the HTTP 500 Error, I had a "General Script Error: Invalid Section ID" instead.

Does this hint at anything stupid I've done...??

I'll continue to bang my head against a brick wall; meanwhile thanks again for any ideas!

N.

[Rich Brady]

There's definitely been no change to the product layout?

I only ask as the the quantity field is usually populated with a default value (1 generally), yet yours are empty.

Lee/Mal, could it be a Product ID/Product Reference issue? Although I would have expected that to affect any add-to-cart not just multiples

[RuralWeb]

Although I would have expected that to affect any add-to-cart not just multiples

Depends if they are duplicates or not

[TraceyG]

Did you contact your hosts as Malcolm suggested? I would check how much memory you have allocated to run scripts.

There's definitely been no change to the product layout?

I only ask as the the quantity field is usually populated with a default value (1 generally), yet yours are empty.

This is because the variable used in the 'value' attribute for the quantity input has been removed but it shouldn't cause a problem, I've just tested it on my localhost and it worked fine.

[Rich Brady]

This is because the variable used in the 'value' attribute for the quantity input has been removed but it shouldn't cause a problem, I've just tested it on my localhost and it worked fine.

Agreed, the fact that's been removed though suggests that the layout has been altered. If so, they may have changed something else?

[nacotton]

The Story Continues...

Hello again everyone, and many thanks once again for all your help and suggestions so far.

Sadly, we've made almost no progress on this recently. Thankfully, we're not an internet-only business but nonetheless the disruption this close to Christmas is FAR from ideal as you can imagine!

A quick recap:

- Yes, we have of course made extensive modifications to layouts in the past (including as Tracey has noted removing the 'value' attribute so that customers didn't have to type over the default "0" quantity in each box, adding a modified-by-Norman version of Norman's NorMatrix that shows sized products with individual availability text next to each, etc, etc).

- However, the point is that all these modifications were made two years ago, and the site has worked perfectly since then.

- Our hosts, XCalibre, have confirmed that they rebuilt the server, changing to Apache v 2.2.3, PHP v 5.2.6 and Perl 5.8.8; the date they did this corresponds roughly to the date we started noticing problems.

- XCalibre promise me faithfully that the servers have more resources now than previously for PHP and Perl

- Norman is confident that his code is future-proof, certainly as far as Perl 5.8.8 is concerned

- Sometimes the error generated says "HTTP 500: Internal Server Error: Website Cannot Display Page"; sometimes it says "A General Script Error Occurred: Error, invalid Section ID number." However, if you then go back and rather than adding two products at once, add the two one by one to the order, it works fine... so can obviously pass a valid Section ID number to the script in that case...

- Naturally, Actinic themselves can't support me because we have modified scripts from Norman.

All of this is way beyond my own technical understanding, so any pointers - even pointers to reliable, good people we could pay to help us fix this - would be HUGELY welcome.

Thanks in advance from an exasperated and frozen Kent countryside!

Neill.

[Darren B]

The best option for you is to try another host, if you think it all went wrong when they upgraded then it is what i would suggest.

If you want to test i can let you try a spare domain, if so PM me

[NormanRouxel]

This site uses multiple products per page with the single add to cart button.

I tested this and found that even on pages that don't use my NorMatrix add-on the server would fault if multiple products were chosen simultaneously.

Obviously the servers RAM or time limits for Perl being exceeded and not an Actinic problem (except that Actinic makes great demands on the server when running Perl scripts).

[Darren B]

Obviously the servers RAM or time limits for Perl being exceeded and not an Actinic problem (except that Actinic makes great demands on the server when running Perl scripts).

Definately seems like it Norman, Neill has uploaded to some test space and it all seems to be working fine, and to be honest i dont see any peaks in resources either

[eezytrade]

I am getting exactly same problem since moving to a new server.

When adding more than one item to the basket, clicking on the 'single add to cart' button' - Any ideas what could be causing it?

http://www.eezytrade.co.uk/acatalog/...xma-MP220.html

Running actinic business v8.5.3

Thanks in advance.

John

[Duncan Rounding]

I've also seen this on a client's site. It turned out to be timeouts on the Perl scripts enforced by the host. The only solution was to move host or reduce the number of products on the page.