Support

April 11, 2017 at 3:57 am

Yes this does sound like an issue during the migration however the only time we’ve seen this is when the EE3 system questions have been completely re-purposed, for example the country field changed to DOB.

I also noticed that my “medical contact number” question is a zip field and my “medical contact relationship” is a phone field (yes they are both locked as system questions!).

Sounds like in EE3 the Zip System Question was repurposed for ‘medical contact number’ and the Phone System Question was repurposed to be ‘medical contact relationship’.

EE4 has no way to identify that you are using those system questions got a different purpose during a migration, system questions should be constant, the above questions should have been added to EE3 as custom questions.

Anyway, how can I edit or replace the system questions, or change their type, or even replace them within a question group?

You can’t do that within the UI, it would need to be done through the database.

By-pass the system personal info question group?

Doing so will completely break Event Espresso, the 3 ‘normal’ system questions in Personal Info are required for registrations to function, it’s the reason they are locked in the first place.

The fix for this is not as simple as renaming the system questions in EE4 after the migration, all of your registrations will now have relationships to the ‘incorrect’ system questions.

Take a look within a registration and then at the contact information on the right, you’ll likely find information in completely the wrong locations. I’ll check in with out developers to see if they can provide any feedback for this.

April 25, 2017 at 11:35 am

Hi Angus,

I spent some time discussing this with one of our developers and unfortunately, there is no easy for this. Looking over your site there are at least 4 system questions that have been repurposed – http://take.ms/kCAmPn

It also looks like there was an issue with the migrations and/or they were not run fully, the EE system information shows no migration history at all (Event Espresso -> Maintenance -> System Information -> ee_migration_history)

Without any history we can’t narrow down what happened with the migrations.

So the site you linked me to is the development site correct?

Do you need the data on that site?

Anyway, how can I edit or replace the system questions, or change their type, or even replace them within a question group? By-pass the system personal info question group?

All of those options basically drive you deeper and deeper into the current issue you have now and will basically just make it harder to fix in the long run.

Do you need to keep all of the previous EE3 registrations within the new system?

If your switching to EE4 you may be better taking the opportunity to start your event data from scratch with the correct setup. (the old registrations can remain as they are within the EE3 database tables if they are needed later but you won’t be able to migrate them over at a later data once you have ‘new’ registrations)

The other option is to build out a script to map all of the ‘repurposed’ EE3 questions to a custom question, fix the system questions for how EE4 expects them and confirm that all of your registrations (and associated contacts) are then mapping to the correct questions (be it system or custom questions), but that would not be covered understand support and will be classed as custom development.

April 28, 2017 at 8:15 am

From what I can ascertain they created the development site by copying from our existing one but exactly what they did from there to upgrade to EE4 I’m unsure, but whatever they did was obviously incorrect.

To migrate they would have just copied either the DB for full site or all of the EE3 tables to your dev site.

To try and clarify a little, when EE4 is first activated it checks for the EE3 tables and asks if you want to migrate the data, from there it is automated within EE4 so the developer needs to just follow the on screen instructions.

The problem is that EE3 has been changed in a way that is unexpected by EE4. The system questions have been used for a completely different purpose than expected so when EE4 uses the data for what it expects, its now wrong. So, in short, its not really the migration that is the problem (it’s a symptom) it’s that the EE3 system questions were repurposed, that should not have happened as you can use custom questions in EE3 for what they have been used for.

So long as we can retain all the WP User accounts, profiles & data we should be good.

Ok, but to be clear, leaving that data will NOT show the events they previously registered on within their profile etc. That may be obvious but I just wanted to make sure its clear.

Since we are switching to EE4, based on the situation on the development server, what do we need to do to sort this out, based on the fact we probably only need to keep the WP data as mentioned above?

Create a backup of the database (just to be safe)

Then go to Event Espresso -> Maintenance -> Reset/Delete Data -> Permanently Delete ALL Event Espresso Tables and Data

That drops all of EE tables and you will lost all event, registration, transaction, messages, pretty much everything apart from some company settings.

You can then start fresh and re-create your event within EE4.

April 28, 2017 at 9:03 am

What do you mean by re-purposed?

Using a system question for let’s say state as a DOB field is an example of repurposing a question.

If the migration was done correctly how come there’s no log of it?

I didn’t say they did it correctly, I just said its automated.

If there were errors during the migration (repurposed questions won’t throw errors) then they may have missed them and continued on without looking into the problem.

Why is the migration log not there? I have no idea.

In our live site, I’ve just checked the system questions and they all look standard and are all formatted to text. We’ve got plenty of custom questions in there. The only thing I can think of is the earlier custom development we had so that profile data (using a combination of system & custom questions) would autofill to our registration forms.

Sounds likely but again it depends on how it was done.

Check your ‘medical contact number’ questions and see if any of those show as system questions.

May 3, 2017 at 9:18 am

The last few are obviously non-standard and were created by one of the EE approved developers, but are all formatted as text questions.

I don’t understand why they’ve added those as system questions. You can add custom questions to the system groups, adding those as system questions seems unnecessary but obviously, I don’t know the full ins and outs of the customization.

So these may not have been re-purposed but are simply new system questions?

Possibly but the Migrations script will not know that.

Could they have been re-purposed by/during the migration, if it wasn’t carried out correctly?

It could be caused by the migration itself, additional system questions aren’t expected and can cause problems.

So the lack of a migration log would indicate that the migration probably wasn’t done correctly?

I don’t know why there is no migration log, the log is saved during each migration so there should be one even if a single migration was run.

is that we will need to completely recreate all our questions, question groups, venue, staff, category, etc, effectively starting from scratch and completely negating everything we’ve already done to set up EE4? In addition to losing all our historical data with the exception of user profiles, so long as they are all in WP?

Correct, resetting EE4 will remove everything that has been done and start fresh.

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If you’d like I take a look at the EE3 data, you can either de-activate EE4 on the test site, installed EE3 and activate it (which should show all of the EE3 data from before you migrated over) and I’ll take a look there.

Or if you prefer I can look on the live site to see the setup.

It does sound like the customizations made to Event Espresso have caused problems with the migration, however, without viewing the migration itself it’s really hard to say what has actually happened.

May 4, 2017 at 11:12 am

From what you’re saying we’d need to remove the custom coding first before a migration could be successfully completed?

I don’t think it will be as simple as that as the registrations have relationships to those questions, removing the questions before migrating doesn’t remove the relationships.

You can still see the original site at our current live site. I can create a login for you there.

Sure I’ll take a look, you can send the details using the same form:

https://eventespresso.com/send-login-details/

I have to query the process for a company to be an approved developer.

We don’t ‘approve’ the developers, they are developers that previous experience with Event Espresso from customizations requests that have requested to be included in the pro’s section to offer their services.

May 18, 2017 at 1:25 pm

Hi Angus,

Firstly I’m sorry for the delay getting back to you, there’s a lot moving parts on your site that I’ve been looking over and truth be told I still don’t follow how some of works.

I’ve just realised another issue that may occur. Since we had the custom coding done, none of the WP User data includes the User email, since we had some coding done to permit multiple profiles under 1 email ID.
Not sure where/how they stored all the data, but if we follow your suggestion I suspect that we will loose a huge number of User accounts/profiles.

This is important and significant, WP Users all require an email address, whatever has been done to allow multiple users without email addresses is going to cause problems outside the scope of migrations.

I don’t think you will ‘lose’ User accounts, they are all still WP Users but the email address isn’t stored anywhere as far as I can tell. I’m assuming these are users that have been added to another user account through the address book plugin?

We’ve now created a development site on our own server. I’ve deactivated all EE3 plugins, and have uploaded EE4 Core, and am currently running it in maintenance mode for the migration. Can I share the URL on here? The logins are the same as for the main site, so you will have access.

Sure you can share the URL here and I’ll view the log, I want to be clear though, I think it is unlikely the ‘fix’ for this will be within the migrations. I don’t think the customizations made are going to be compatible with EE4 (I may be wrong) but to be honest the best person to tell if this could be ported over correctly would be the original developer.

The key thing is keeping people’s login details (u/n & p/w), the events that they entered (is there a way to merge records? some people have more than 1 account due to an inability to remember login details!), their profile questions etc can afford to be lost (if no other option), it doesn’t take long to fill them again.

Under normal circumstances, I would say the user accounts will be completely fine, they should be completely separate from the EE data as they are WP Users, however the ‘Users without email addresses’ complicates this as I have no idea what is actually happening with the accounts.

the events that they entered (is there a way to merge records? some people have more than 1 account due to an inability to remember login details!),

Not without manually going through and reassigning the details to the ‘original’ user account manually within the database, this again will likely be complicated by the above no email address issue.

their profile questions etc can afford to be lost (if no other option), it doesn’t take long to fill them again.

Profile data from within their account? That should not be part of EE and should remain.

If you send me over the test site I’ll log in and see if the log gives me any more of an idea of the issue.

May 19, 2017 at 5:03 am

To be fair, the developer was hired to customise EE3 and they have done so (which I assume you were happy with at the time), EE4 is a completely different system to EE3 (it’s not just an update to EE3 but a complete revamp).

Whilst we try to migrate our expected data over from EE3 to EE4, its unlikely 3rd party developer customizations made to EE3 would ‘just work’ with EE4 without modifications as it’s a completely new/different system than what they modified.

I have no idea how they’ve modified the WP Users to not use email addresses as I’m not reviewing the custom coding line by line and its outside the scope for EE.

I’ve asked for some developer feedback on your migration logs and will update this thread when they reply.