Method Community

Saturday 15 Jan 6:00 pm Mountain. Another day, more hangups and failures by the Method engine.

+ Both error-checking options are still checked. QB is open on the master/Admin account.

+ Yesterday's Changes-only synch, launched at 6:45, completed at some point in the evening.

+ The Full synch, which was scheduled for 11:30 pm, completed more-or-less successfully at about 11:45 pm last night.

+ I ran both a Changes and a Full synch this morning. The Full synch completed at 8:47 am.

+ Change-only synchs continued every hour until 12:50 pm today (Saturday).

+ At 12:30 I saved qbsdklog.txt and qbsdkold.txt to my desktop. I'll send them to you via email.

+ After the 12:50 Changes synch completed,  I made some changes to various transactions and Customers in QB - in most cases, adding a TxRegion value where there wasn't one, trying to clean up a Dec sales report.

+ After reviewing some QB sales reports, I realized that there were transactions that been entered after the last time Michael successfully ran Update Transactions. Since the next synch was scheduled for 60 minutes away, I launched the Update Transactions function from the Method website.

+ I changed one Rep in QB, making him active. (He had been made inactive by staff mistake on Friday, apparently.)

+ Another synch started running at 12:55 (presumably a Changes-only). If it was launched by the PUSH feature, then that suggests that the system will start updating every time changes are made to the database. Given our experience with the MI engine's performance lately, that's not a good thing.

+ At 12:57, the Update Transactions routine completed and gave me a confirmation dialog.

+ For the rest of the afternoon the engine showed it was checking records in the Invoices table. Eventually, about 5:45, it showed signs of life, indicating it was working on other tables.

+ At Jan-15-2011 05:07:43 PM Method logged one conflict. I've left it up in the conflicts listing.

+ At 6:00 pm, the engine crashed and threw this error: "MethodIntegrationEngineForUseWithQuickBooks has encountered a problem and needs to close..."

+ 6:40 pm - restarted QB. Upon loading, Method engine immediately began synching. As before, I disconnected Method so that I could turn the troubleshooting options back on, but this time Method hung up and showed nothing but the hourglass.

+ I exited Method, waited, and reopened the application. As quickly as I could I turned on the options, but it had already started synching again.

HOW IS ONE SUPPOSED TO INVOKE THE TROUBLESHOOTING OPTIONS IF THE ENGINE BEGINS SYNCHING IMMEDIATELY UPON LOADING?

+ 6:45 pm - Method continues to show an hourglass. I'll let it sit there, and post again shortly.

Lee

Saturday 6:50 pm

+ Method engine crashed and displayed the "...encountered a problem and needs to close..." message.

+ Made one more attempt to restart Method and turn on troubleshooting options, but engine locked up again.

+ Re-started Method and just let it run.

+ Method is now churning through "checking desktop" in Invoices 1 of 1.

I'm going to add to this thread too.

About a year ago we experienced similar problems with our own QuickBooks database (yes we use QuickBooks and Method to run our company too).

The server running QuickBooks was shut down unexpectedly (I believe it was a power failure).  After this happened, the sync started failing, and QuickBooks was shutting down regularly by itself.  We ran a full verify and rebuild in QuickBooks, and after this happened we experienced symptoms similar to what you are describing.

Since we have access to run this through the source code and see exactly what is going on (being the developers of the sync engine) we discovered that QuickBooks had done a major repair on our QuickBooks file. Almost every invoice in QuickBooks had a modified date of today - and there were 10's of thousands of invoices.  The way our sync works is that it looks for records that have been modified since the last successful sync.  This is usually a small handful.  It processes each one and sends the modified data to QuickBooks.  At the same time if there are associated records (like customers because when an invoice changes, so does the customer balance) they also need to get synced too.  So in our case the sync was taking forever because QuickBooks had indicated practically every invoice had been modified in the last few minutes - which overwhelmed the sync engine.  Eventually, the sync engine synced everything and it got back to normal again.

If you want, you could verify this theory by modifying or creating a new invoice screen and adding the TimeModified column to the Existing Invoices grid. If you check that it shows the modified date.  If you see a huge number of recently modified invoices....well my guess is that you are experiencing exactly what we did and you will soon be back to normal...you just need to let Method eventually get through all the records.

I hope that helps,

Paul

That's weird. I replied to Paul's posting this morning - wonder what happened to it?

At this point, we've been synching successfully since Saturday night. Based on what we've learned, we're recognizing and accepting the following points:

+ On the machine running the MI engine, we're going to log into QB as Admin whenever possible. We understand that although logging in as a user with admin-level permissions ("CRM") is supposed to work, that QB doesn't always agree, and we may generate some occasional "permissions" conflicts by using this procedure.

+ We're going to avoid making changes that impact many records during regular operating hours. So all Verify/Rebuilds and customer records changes will be pushed to EOD Fridays.

+ Michael, this caution applies particularly to the custom screens you've designed - we have to be careful not to "Update all" during ops hours, or we're in for a very long synch. (See separate email regarding the custom functions, please.)

+ If performance degrades again due to the volume of synched records, we'll consider cutting back on the history period we're currently maintaining.

Still-0pen Questions:

? Is it possible to configure the Method engine so that it only opens manually, and not automatically when QB is opened? If so, how does one do that?

? In general terms, what is the difference between the Changes synch and the Full synch -- presumably the Changes synchs are keeping the db updated, so what does the Full synch do differently?

Otherwise, we'll keep plugging along until something goes wrong.

Lee