Downloads triggering erraticly

[NWCE]

Hi,

I am running v1.5.0 and have not made any modifications for at least 6 months. I sell downloadable products and what started happening yesterday was some orders processed fine and had all of the downloads triggered, I receive the confirmation email that shows their order but there are no downloads for them. The order processed correctly with the Paypal Transaction ID showing in their order details, etc...everything as normal except the downloads did not trigger and the order is set to Processing. I then have several more orders that are fine, and then another without downloads. I have checked the Attributes to ensure that the downloads were not somehow corrupted and they are active downloads and this is all correct. It is not confined to a specific product, as one person can order an item and not receive their downloads and the next customer can order the same product and receive their downloads. I have also had orders where a customer has purchased several items and they are receiving their downloads for some of the products on their order but some of the products do not have downloads on this same order.

I have talked to my host and they checked error logs, etc. did an Apache restart, but I am still having the issue....and of course they are now saying it is not on their side, but coding issues which is not correct. The one thing different on the server side is they installed a second hard drive 2 days ago. The next morning is when this started happening. The second hard drive is only used to store nightly backups through WHM.

I am hoping that someone can point me in the right direction!

Thanks in advance for your help,

Jeff

[NWCE]

Does anyone know what software on a server would process these queries to process the orders?? SQL or some other program that I could have my host reboot??

Thanks for any help,

Jeff

[DrByte]

When you say "the downloads did not trigger", what exactly do you mean?
The word "trigger" suggests to me that someone would attempt to "trigger" a download by clicking a download button.
But I'm guessing you're talking about something different, such as orders being saved without any attribute selections chosen?

Download attributes don't automatically get added to the cart if the customer doesn't actually add them to their shopping basket. You the administrator can properly configure your attributes to ensure that the customer has to actually make a choice, and then can see those choices in the shopping basket before confirming payment .. and then they can see them in their order details in their My Account History page and so can you as the administrator in the order page on the admin side.
If they're not getting added, then either you've not set up those attributes to be a required selection, or you've got something else going on beyond original Zen Cart code that's interfering with how attributes and downloads are saved when orders are placed.

This is where I start with bizarre things like that: http://www.zen-cart.com/wiki/index.p...Obscure_Issues

[NWCE]

Hi Dr.Byte,

Thank you for your reply. I am sorry about using the word "triggering" and it being confusing as to my meaning. What I am referring to is when a customer places their order, checks out, and then pays at Paypal and is returned to our store....Paypal sends back the ping to let the cart know that the order has been paid for and my cart can then "trigger" or process the order and provide the customer with their download links.

The problem I am/was having (several orders went through overnight and they were all perfectly fine with download links provided for customer) was that the order processing was exactly as it should be....the order shows in my Admin and when viewing the order I see the Paypal Transaction number, shows the product(s) that they have ordered, order dollar total, etc. but there are no download links for the customer to click on to download their order.

I very strongly suspected this was due to software on the server side as we have had our store for many years, have not made any changes or modifications to our v.1.5.0 store for at least 6 months and our host had just installed a second hard drive. Myself not knowing the server software well, I cannot intelligently point them in the direction of where to look to restart a service in order to correct the error. They simply say "it must be coding on your site" and not our issue....which leaves me with this problem and no way to know how to get them to fix it.

Thank you once again for your reply....as I mentioned earlier in this post, every order last night came through perfectly with download links for each order, so I am cautiously optimistic that it has now resolved itself.

Thanks again for your help,

Jeff

[DrByte]

Shouldn't be related to the host adding a hard drive. (only remotely related would be if they moved a bunch of customers to that drive and skipped a bunch of files, but then they'd have a ton of customers complaining all at once, so they're probably correct to tell you "it's a software issue")

If "you" didn't change anything on your store knowingly, then you still ought to go and inspect some of those orders that were missing their download links. Look whether the attributes were actually saved onto the products (you know what that looks like, by looking at "good" orders). Then go try to buy that item yourself (don't need to pay, just try to put it into your cart). Can you find a way to prevent the attribute from getting included in the cart? If so, then that's how those customers did it.

Also, look at the /logs folder and see what PHP errors might have been recorded when those 'bad' orders were placed. Maybe something's amuck and you can track it by looking at error reports.

And, do a full site-inspection of all your PHP files and the products+attributes in your database to make sure everything has not been tampered with, just for peace of mind. This is how I compare files: http://www.zen-cart.com/wiki/index.p...Obscure_Issues

[NWCE]

Thanks very much for your help and advice Dr. Byte. I will follow your instructions to inspect the attributes on the "good" and "bad" orders, as well as look through the logs reports once again to see if I missed something. Lastly I will scour the site for any unwanted tampering.


Thanks again, you provide an invaluable service to all of us using Zen Cart through this forum (and of course development). It is much appreciated!

Jeff