AbleCommerce Shopping Cart Software

Just did this upgrade and having several issues.

Customer notification emails not working as they used to, some are , some are not. Notes section seems to be the most problematic. We ad notes and customers cant see them in their order and they get double emails that don't have the note , just some code. The notes do not print on the orders any longer.

We noticed the setting on kits changed to where the kit items are not printed on the invoice.

Any other changes we need to look for or a thread regarding this? I did try searching first.

Also was a little disappointed the problem with Insurance on USmail wasn't fixed and the first class wasn't correctly done. I did find the fix for the first class. Simple fix for the insurance is to allow a handling charge thats a percentage of the order amount. Now its a percentage of the shipping charge. Why its a percentage of the shipping charge and not the order amount is beyond me.

I was also hoping for a better inventory management system and reports. Like sales history by item.

Something else that's needed is an inventory status on each item. I realize it shows available items if the item is not checked for backorder allowed. But if backorder allowed is checked then the customer has no idea if its in or out of stock. I had a custom app created with stock status lags but with the upgrade we lost it as it was not documented by my old webmaster and he died. We will have it done again as it is vital to our operation.

We got the kit issue worked out. Once we reset all the kits to show the contents of the kit it worked and we really do like the way it shows on the invoice now.

The biggest problem we have is time outs. With the old version we had to run 2 dedicated servers to get performance up. We thought that the new upgrade would run much cleaner as it did in testing so we put it all on one server. It worked well in testing. But under the load of going live it sputtered like a V8 running on 3 cylinders. We had 1800 timeouts errors in 3 days. Found out that the Able code has many dead ends that were not trapped causing the DB to crash and time out. So we put it back on 2 dedicated servers, one for the application and one for the DB. So when the application hits those untrapped errors it doesn't stack up and choke the DB. It was said that Able may not have been designed for the way we use it, stressing it pretty hard.

This is how it stands now - Still seems to be working pretty fast, had a few instances of the application server (web server) hog all the ram available to it (the issue that was causing the resource stacking and choking out of the db), but the process completed, hit its hard limit and exited, probably resulting in an error page but not choking out the db and causing more errors and killing the site, so it seems like the plan is working.

We may be looking into some patch to fix the choke points but thought maybe somebody may already know something that would work better.

Check your NavigationHelper.cs in the App_Code folder. When Able 7.0.7 first came out there was code in there that used the pageviews table to determine the referring category for a product page. That really slowed the sites down, so they reverted that code out later.

Thanks Judy, they did check that and confirm its not the problem.

Apparently we are stressing the application heavily. We haven't had a DB crash since we went to 2 servers but the application has. He wants to try a third server to host images on. He would do a second application server but the licensing issues would be a nightmare. This may be a better solution than detailing code problems and asking for fixes from able. They have some other solutions they are discussing. I am just throwing it out here to see if anybody had an idea.

We eventually found out we needed a much bigger server. It has been running with no crashes for a month. Not sure of the processor but the ram on this server is 16GB. At peak times we are using 14. Still getting some errors but it powers through them.

one error is this - String or binary data would be truncated. The statement has been terminated.

This resulted from an item with several options. I assume the name of these options piled up are just to long. Is there a limit to characters used for options? Just wouldn't allow the purchase to complete at the pay button. Changed one option to shorter nondescript and it worked.

Seems like there's something off that's causing problems on your site. What kind of a daily hit count do you have? How many products?

AbleCommerce has been able to easily handle quite heavy hit counts with very little increase in server usage even when we got big spikes from exposure in national publications. And, our server serves 16 different sites with 4GB RAM and has both the DB and App on it.

chuckdvc wrote:one error is this - String or binary data would be truncated. The statement has been terminated.

This resulted from an item with several options. I assume the name of these options piled up are just to long. Is there a limit to characters used for options? Just wouldn't allow the purchase to complete at the pay button. Changed one option to shorter nondescript and it worked.

I've seen this happen when the AC7 install was originally done on SQL 2000 then later migrated to a newer SQL engine. The SQL table schema is slightly different when AC7 sees it's SQL 2000. Certain text fields are shorter than future programming expects them to be.

Examples are fields where you see nchar(255) in SQL 2000 but see nvarchar(max) in later installs. nvarchar(max) wasn't supported in SQL 2000 so Able had to limit the field size.

Usually the exception thrown will give you some sort of indication of what table is the cause. Once you determine the table involved, you change the field type of the text fields and see if that resolves the error. Doing it one by one is more time consuming, but it will tell you exactly which field(s) need fixed.

Dave, We have 140 Manufacturers. Not sure where to find the product count but i assume its several thousand especially with all the variants we have. We have 1 Special order item that with all the variants has 12,000 possible combinations. The dashboard shows 340k a month in page views. I am told we have lots of pictures and they are being linked all over the world.

AbleMods, I localized to what field it was. I went back and shortened the characters in each variant and it worked afterwards. That may be the issue. I will point this out.

AbleMods, Since you do Mods, do you have anything that enables for Insurance Cost adding onto shipping charge calculation for USmail? They have a box that allows a percentage handling fee to be added but it uses the shipping cost to ad the percentage not the order total. If that was set to use the order total we could use this to add on the insurance charge. We do a large spread of order values. Usmail can run up into the thousands per box although we try to use UPS for those and the insurance calculation works for that. So many little things could have been thought of but i suppose you wouldn't have a market for mods would you?