Admin Keepalive Timer [Support Thread]

Kevin205:

FYI: using Zen Cart 1.5.1

It works perfectly in Firefox (18.0.1). I only wish it would warn you of the session ending with a popup window. If you are using many tabs in your browser or have many browser windows open, and the admin window is not active, you will miss the warning

Hello DrByte,

I love your app. Especially the feature that if your session expires, you have an option to close and copy your work. However, unlike Kevin, when the timer pops up, I would prefer, if when you are viewing a different tab, that it doesn't scroll to the admin page and make it as the active page. Too many times, I have been in the middle of reviewing something with a client or typing something into a browser page, then suddenly my tabs shift/scroll to the admin page, I click, then have to click back on the tab that I was working on. Is there a change I can implement into the code that will either (a) have only the pop up box pop into view on top of my current active page, or (b) have the pop up box pop up on the admin page without it scrolling and making my admin page active? If either of these could be easily implemented by me, not only would it be acceptable, but awesome. If b is the easiest option, I would rather have to log back in than to have my pages keep scrolling.

Thank You,

Sharon

Sharon,
I'm not sure I've seen that behavior. Which browser/version are you using with this? And what version of Windows/Mac/Linux are you using on your computer?

Hello DrByte,

I am using FireFox 18.0.2 and WindowsXP Pro Service Pack 3.

Sharon

Sharon J:

Hello DrByte,

I am using FireFox 18.0.2 and WindowsXP Pro Service Pack 3.

Sharon

Hello DrByte,

I also have the same issue using chrome Version 24.0.1312.57 m. I originally installed the add on to my demo site on my local machine with XAMPP. As I am preparing to go live, I installed ZC 1.51 on my web host. I did not back up my demo site and then load it, I did a complete clean install by adding each mod individually, as I have a few on my demo that I decided not to use. This issue is still present on my new site....Since you stated that you're not sure that you've seen this behavior, are there any particular files or a particular place that you are aware of that I should look to try and track this issue or conflict?

Thank You,

Sharon

I've often had it timeout in another tab while reading something in another tab. I've never seen it flip me back to the Zen Cart tab automatically.

I was really glad to find this add-on and installed it on an upgrade I'm doing for client because I know they will have trouble with the timing out. However, it doesn't seem to be working as described. Instead here's what happens

• I am on another tab (or even in another application with the browser still open but minimized)
• about 8 minutes into the idle time, the focus goes to the ZC admin tab
• a popup message is displayed which says:

We are unable to connect to the server. Your work may be lost. Please review your work and perhaps copy information to your clipboard if you had any work in progress which you do not wish to lose.

• there is only a button that says OK
• if I click the button the session does not time out
• if I don't click the button but click the x on the pop up message it also does not time out

Others have also mentioned something about a green color on the screen but that doesn't happen for me - just the pop up and it comes up quite a bit before 15 minutes.

I am running ZC v. 1.5.1 viewing with Chrome 24.0.1312.57 on WinXp (SP3)

Just to add to the above... I went back to the tab a little while later - maybe about 10 minutes later (after clicking OK on the popup) and it looks like it actually did timeout. I clicked on just anything in admin and got the log in screen.

earmsby:

• a popup message is displayed which says:

We are unable to connect to the server. Your work may be lost. Please review your work and perhaps copy information to your clipboard if you had any work in progress which you do not wish to lose.
That's part of a secondary time-out protection feature inside the plugin which checks to see if there's been a timeout that it couldn't account for, or if the server has disappeared. In those cases you wouldn't want to lose the work you'd been doing either, so this is a courtesy secondary protection offered by the plugin so that you don't unexpectedly lose what you had on the screen.
While I've never had that get triggered on production or test servers (except when specifically forcing the connection to break so that feature could be programmed initially), I wouldn't be surprised to learn that you were running into that sort of problem in a dev environment where high-availability of servers is not a priority.

earmsby:

the focus goes to the ZC admin tab
I've been using this plugin on a large number of sites in the last week, and have never yet seen the focus change to the ZC admin tab.
While one other person has reported similar symptoms, also on WinXP, I've yet to encounter it. It sounds like something outside the script's control.

Interesting. I am running this store "in development" but really only in the sense that it's not public. The client's live site is currently on another server and this new upgraded site is on their new dedicated server. However, it may be that the DNS issues I had in trying to log in are effecting it (although I did solve those and the domain name used on the new site does resolve properly).

I'll try it on another machine (Windows 7) and see if it still happens.

I don't mind the timeout so much, but what I hate is the fact that you lose your work when creating a product. My customers are complaining that they spend time on their product and hit preview, then get logged out. Your plugin is wonderful, but what if the phone rings or something takes you away from your computer. If you don't hit that update button, you have to start all over again. There must be a way to create a temp backup at time of timeout.

Steve:

I don't mind the timeout so much, but what I hate is the fact that you lose your work when creating a product. My customers are complaining that they spend time on their product and hit preview, then get logged out. Your plugin is wonderful, but what if the phone rings or something takes you away from your computer. If you don't hit that update button, you have to start all over again. There must be a way to create a temp backup at time of timeout.
Hi Steve!
Sounds like they're misunderstanding things. If they click "Close" (instead of "Login") they'll be able to go back to what they were editing, copy it to their clipboard, and then they'll have the info to paste back in again. That's all this thing does. Zen Cart doesn't yet have any "temp backup" for those pages. We're working on possibilities, but this plugin is a stop-gap measure in the meantime. Using the clipboard will help them. If there's a better way to reword the message which tells them to do that (without making it a mile long cuz we know nobody reads messages anyway), the feedback is welcome.

hey Doc, everything was working well then all of a sudden, the popup wont popup, the cont rols are on the ppage, they work but i get a 404 error on the jqueryui css link? any clues?
//ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jqueryui/1/themes/base/jquery-ui.css
Jeff

Looks like Google has broken their links.

You could maybe change it to this instead: ```
http://code.jquery.com/ui/1.10.2/themes/smoothness/jquery-ui.css

But that'll probably give you SSL/security warning errors if you're running your admin in SSL.

Another option is to copy the actual file to your own server and use it from there by entering the correct path for where you've put it.

:clap: Thank you

Uploaded update to accommodate google's change in their CDN URLs

Got this up and running on a live demo site without problems.

Tested on Linux Mint 14 with Firefox 21.0

Thanks DrByte!

Cheers / Frank

Awsome, works excellent.

Browser: Chrome
Server: TBD

Unfortunately, I uninstalled the plug in. The "We are unable to connect to the server. Your work may be lost. Please review your work and perhaps copy information to your clipboard if you had any work in progress which you do not wish to lose." was interfering with other work in the Google Chrome Browser.

For now, I'm just going to leave the "who's online" window open, with a refresh every 1 min. A more versatile solution is required, but thank you DrByte for your efforts. I appreciate them, and I used the plug in for a few weeks. I assumed the "We are unable to connect to the server. Your work may be lost. Please review your work and perhaps copy information to your clipboard if you had any work in progress which you do not wish to lose." was a problem with my webhost, who recently switched physical servers on me.

Dr Byte,

Repeatedly getting the secondary warning of "We are unable to connect to the server. Your work may be lost. Please review your work and perhaps copy information to your clipboard if you had any work in progress which you do not wish to lose."

This happens using locally using MAMP & Zend Server, and also on live sites on several different servers.

How can this secondary warning be disabled because the rest of the plugin works perfectly for us.

That warning is a result of a failure occurring when the script attempts to connect to your server in the background to determine if it's reachable. After a certain number of failures it displays that message.