Support

February 11, 2022 at 4:17 am

Hi there,

It appears as if a customer’s future order replaced the transaction items from the older order with the transaction items from that order.

How is the user getting to your site to add this registration?

For example, are they clicking a link from one of the previous emails? What I’m wondering here is if they are opening their previous session using a link from the email/history (such as one of the checkout links) and then continuing to try to add a new registration. I can’t reproduce that issue myself but trying to think of ways in which this might happen.

It’s weird because our original transaction shows this status:

Transaction Status: Overpaid
Total Amount Due: $-534.00
Registration Step Progress
Attendee Information : Initiated December 9, 2021 7:35 pm
Finalize Registration : Never Initiated

When you view the transaction, do you see tickets/line items displayed in the ‘Transaction Items’ shown in the ‘Transaction Details’ metabox? I’m guessing not.

What is the finalize registration step, and if it was never initiated, why was payment charged and an email sent to the customer?

When you register onto an event you go to what we call the single page checkout process (SPCO for short) which can have multiple ‘steps’, by default you’ll have 2 shown:

1. Attendee information.
2. Payment options

There is also the finalize step, but it’s not shown to the user as it is internal and it is the process that happens when you click to pay/finalize the registration.

For the user to have been charged the finalize step must have been initiated, they can’t be charged without that happening, so whatever is causing the issue with the transaction is likely also wiping out the data to show the finalize step.

Also, when we try to click on view receipt for this transaction, we get this error:

An error has occurred:
Incoming data does not have a valid Attendee object for the primary registrant.

Something is updating the transaction with invalid data so then when you try to access features of the transaction its blows everything up. Unfortunately, right now, I can’t tell you what that ‘something’ is, but the transaction has been broken so anything that relies on it will throw an error.

This is so strange! So we had a customer show up for an event they thought they had purchased tickets to (and did according to the email), but they did not show up in the list of registrants.

I’m sorry that happened and I’m not just throwing that out there, it sucks when things go wrong and we don’t like it any more than you (the end user) does.

Was this a bug fixed in a recent version of EE4?

Not that I’m aware of, no. The above isn’t a known bug.

We have seen something similar a few times and it turns out to be caching but no other known issues.

We’re running an older version (4.10.8.p) due to heavy customizations we’ve made, but I don’t recall touching any code relating to transactions.

I know of 1 where you are hooking into the finalize step:

https://eventespresso.com/topic/new-payment-method-hook-into-proceed-to-finalize-registration-call/

And no, I’m not blaming your customizations here but it is possible to be some of the custom code just as much as ours which makes this tricky.

If this is some kind of known issue, race condition, or quantity problem during the last step when the order is finally entered, please let me know, as I would like to backport the fix into our version.

I’d love to be able to tell you what is causing the above and that we have a fix, but this isn’t a known issue.

Anyone have any idea what could be happening? I looked at the entries in the database, and it doesn’t really give me any more information as to what happened.

I’ll prefix this with the fact that I don’t have a solution to fix this but what I think has happened to that transaction is the line items have somehow been deleted/replaced.

That’s actually relatively easy to confirm, the above ‘Transaction Items’ section being empty pretty much confirms it but its easy enough to check the database if you comfortable with phpMyAdmin?

On the site, take note of the Transaction ID for that broken one.

In the site’s DB, open up wp_esp_line_item, do a search on that table and search for the TXN_ID matching the ID you noted above.

Like so: https://monosnap.com/file/Ib3HT74HZjN4rMyGrFEko6C9BHUt9C

Obviously, your TXN_ID will be different.

What do you see?

—

The ‘somehow’ part is going to be the really difficult part to narrowing this down, it’s not widespread and we don’t have many reports of situations like this so it’s not a plain old core issue. It’s going to be under the right conditions with a specific request (which may also even rely on a specific server config, who knows) to reproduce this and as it doesn’t happen on all registrations so I could likely run through the exact same steps the user did 1000 times and still not reproduce.