Method Community

Sometimes The Method Integration Engine disconnects from Method without any warning. When I later discover that Method hasn't synced with Quickbooks for several hours, despite the fact that Quickbooks is open and logged in and Method Integration Engine is still running, I open the Engine from the Notification area and I see the screen in the photo below, w/a bunch of asterix

And the Text:

3/15/2017 4:50:45 PM Error: Invalid Company Account.  Check the spelling and try again.

3/15/2017 4:50:42 PM Error: Invalid Company Account.  Check the spelling and try again.

If I click connect to Quickbooks. It connects just fine and starts syncing again.

We only have one Company File and it is located on a Windows 2008 Server with DNS and Active Directory services installed

What would cause Method Integration Engine to randomly logs itself out after being unable to recognize a Company File that it has been syncing with for hours or days without any interruption?

I've had the same issue.  It takes a long time before it happens, but it has been going on for a long time.  I have simplified my QB and Sync Engine hosting onto a Windows 7 PC that does not get shut off instead of the server solution I was using since I need to keep a user logged into QB, etc.  I do not know why the Sync Engine drops it's login either.  But, there are so many disruptions on any machine these days that it could be anything.  QB is not very stable in the latest releases either and there is a lot of QB bloatware running.  For example the QB Web connector, which is garbage, is always in the background.  I can see some of these processes when I go to shutdown the machine gracefully and they are the last programs to close.  My guess is that QB is really the culprit in the stability of the connection, not Method.  Just a guess.

James

Hi James - Thanks for the insights. We've been working with the other customer offline, but I wanted to see if this issue is still happening with you or something you've seen in the past. If still happening with you, we would be happy to have someone reach out to see what we might find in your specific scenario as there a number of factors as it relates to sync which may or may not align with others' scenarios. Please let us know and we can have someone reach out.

Cheers,

Jim

Jim,

Thanks so much for following up.  I'm not really sure how current the problem is.  When it is happening it can go days or even weeks before it hangs up.  It's not a big problem except that I don't know it's happened until someone else is trying to do something in Method and they see that records are not updated.  I had just wanted to validate the original poster's experience, but not conflate the problem.

I really do think it has more to do with what's going on in the OS and QB than the Sync Engine.  The Sync engine is really stable and the sync conflict errors are much less frequent and almost always due to bad data somehow created by the user.  I'm very happy with the Sync Engine and I just update it whenever a new release comes out.

It is an ongoing effort to keep a Windows system trouble free and QB has become worse over time.  The QB core functionality is very stable but the add on functionality like Backups or any Web based services are poorly coded and cause minor problems.  I am often needing to launch QB twice since it fails to come up clean on the first try.  I think that has to do with some Web service not being happy and I don't care to make it happy.  I'd rather just disable all the bloatware on QB.

So, I don't think we should spend any time on the Sync engine troubleshooting for now.  In my opinion it is the least likely culprit, and it's been running for at least a week or so without restart recently.

Best Regards,

James

This is still an ongoing weekly issue for me. In response to this issue, I believe that Method CRM has been developing a method for receiving notifications when issues occur with the sync engine, which I think would be very helpful. Knowing when the sync engine crashes or when a particular sync is stuck would mean that we could prevent these issues from negatively affecting worker productivity and their experience with Method CRM.

I am looking forward to the next release to incorporate notifications of this sort.

Jesse

Yeah, I think an E-mail notification would be good.  Although that might just send us back to trying to figure out the root cause.  There is something odd about the way the engine retries to connect related to it's stored memory of the login and password, etc.  And timers and counters for retrying.  When I reconnect I am often just asking the engine to try again without doing anything and it connects right up.  As if it just quit trying too soon or something.  I'm not doing anything different when I get it to connect versus what it might do to re-establish connection.  I have not wanted to ask for a watchdog since these tend to be over complicated and cause more problems as implemented by younger software developers.  The TCP/IP protocol timers are a good place to start, they are much longer than most people would ever assume.

But, in either case, it's easy to manage if I know the engine has disconnected and I can just restart before a user encounters a problem.  How many times have I said, oh it's stopped synching, give me a minute and try again.

James