syncing issues

P.S. There’s budget for this if custom investigation and solutions are required, we could likely hire your team to solve this.

First, I don’t guarantee ACF support in this plugin, although I’ve tried to support it whenever possible. Beyond that:

1. I can say that this plugin doesn’t convert published posts back to drafts. At least I’ve never seen it do that.
2. To me this sounds like a data cache issue. You might have some kind of server side caching (redis, memcache, etc.) that runs on your server, and it may be that it gets cleared when a post is updated but not when this plugin runs its operations. If that is the case, you might be able to use one of the developer hooks to clear the cache after the plugin successfully saves data from Salesforce.
3. If that isn’t the case, I think you may want to see if you can reproduce this in a local environment (presumably with a sandbox).

PS there isn’t really a team that consistently works on this plugin at MinnPost (or anywhere else), it’s just me.

Thanks for the quick reply @jonathanstegall!

1. Its not actually switching from “published” to “draft” in the classic WP sense, but in terms of it being visible or not via post query

2. we don’t have any caching system in place, so does that make it sound like its an ACF problem? That your plugin could be importing data from SF, where it “almost” is saved into an ACF field, but then isn’t visible until manually published?

3. will see if someone on our team can do that.

Finally, if its just you… are you available for hire to help solve these issues?

If it’s not a cache, I think it’s possible that there is some kind of intermediate state. It would be good to know what that is, if it’s new to ACF and if it’s a consistent behavior that this plugin needs to account for.

I think if you can get a local setup (or if you have database access you could just inspect the database wherever it is), you should check the database to see what is happening with the relevant fields before the post gets published, and then compare it to the values for those fields that are in the database after it gets published. ACF creates several fields for a record, if I recall correctly, so it may be that something is missing in the middle.

I’m not currently available to hire, but that’s where I would start.

Did another round of testing with debugging turned on and got these errors:

[08-Sep-2021 13:57:35 UTC] PHP Notice: Trying to get property ‘ID’ of non-object in /www/htdocs/w01a2ea9/sanktoberholz.de/wp-includes/class-wp-query.php on line 4044
[08-Sep-2021 13:57:35 UTC] PHP Notice: Trying to get property ‘post_title’ of non-object in /www/htdocs/w01a2ea9/sanktoberholz.de/wp-includes/class-wp-query.php on line 4046
[08-Sep-2021 13:57:35 UTC] PHP Notice: Trying to get property ‘post_name’ of non-object in /www/htdocs/w01a2ea9/sanktoberholz.de/wp-includes/class-wp-query.php on line 4048

This happened in this intermediate state, where I change content in SF, it appears in the ACF field in the back-end post editor, but then the post disappears from the post query.

That provide any useful clues?

Well at that stage, the plugin is trying to use the core WordPress methods for dealing with posts so it’s hard to be sure. But my guess is that it’s trying to modify a post that hasn’t loaded or doesn’t exist.

I think at this stage you really need to reproduce this in a local environment so you can do your own debugging, or hire someone else who can do that kind of work.

Still trying to debug. ACF support said:

If you don’t find the updated data then the import could be a draft post. In this case the data could be attached to a different post ID and this post ID will be a child post of the real post ID. You can look for this by looking for posts where the post_parent is the real post ID.

After frustrating attempts to find the postmeta tables for the existing post IDs, I decided to try deleting all of the imported assets and just start over.

Now I can’t even sync anything. Turned on logging and got this:

Error: WordPress update for assets ID 21960 from Salesforce record 02i5I0000049jPsQAI was unsuccessful with these errors:

Errors from WordPress result:

WP_Error Object
(
[errors] => Array
(
[invalid_post] => Array
(
[0] => Invalid post ID.
)

)

[error_data] => Array
(
)

[additional_data:protected] => Array
(
)

)

So the plugin seems to be permanently mapping SF assets to posts that are gone, with no way to reset that? Only thing I can find in the settings that seems remotely close is “Prevent Duplicate Field Mapping?” but that’s not checked. Any ideas so I can start over?

Currently, the plugin does not have a way to delete object maps unless the fieldmap is configured to delete records. That is, on the Action Triggers, you can check the “WordPress Delete” and “Salesforce Delete” boxes. That is 1) maybe not what you want, and 2) not helpful for things that have already been deleted.

I do have an issue on GitHub to figure out what to do with object maps that correspond to deleted records. Would welcome pull requests if you want to work on that, but currently the only way to keep that from happening is to delete the rows from the wp_object_sync_sf_object_map table. You can do that manually, or you can uninstall the plugin with the “Delete Plugin Data on Uninstall?” box checked, and then reinstall it. It’s probably worth doing that if you’re starting over.

Hi @jonathanstegall tried to backup, disable and delete but not really sure where that worked. Does your setting to delete all data work in multisite contexts? Soon as I deleted, I reinstalled and the odd thing is that I saw the salesforce keys already before importing. There were also two posts from days ago that instantly reappeared after re-installing, which seemed odd.

So far nothing is importing after 10 minutes or so, which led to me wonder if multisite is somehow interfering with the delete process.

I’m not sure, actually. I’ve certainly never done any work for this plugin to work in multisite and I don’t think I’d claim that it’s supported.

I’d be open to accepting any multisite specific pull requests, in any case.

Assumed it was the multisite thing, so I went ahead and deleted the object_sync_sf_object_map table and am now seeing the last two edits syncing.

I can see both of those newly synced posts in the database in wp_posts. Both marked there and in WP backend as published. I can also see all of the data from SF in the postmeta table in my ACF fields, as well as in the backend when editing the post.

And yet, even with all of this, nothing is “live” until I manually click UPDATE.

Next I try to make a text change in SF and rather than updating the existing post, a new one is created rather than updating the existing post.

So… any ideas from the above info?

I think like I said a couple weeks ago, you need to inspect the wp_posts and wp_postmeta tables before you click update, and then do it again after you click update. Literally, do an export of those tables and find out what is different. You might want to use a diff tool if the tables are large, and then you can find out exactly what values are not the same. I would also look at wp_options though, in case you do have some kind of transient that is not being cleared until you click update. And again, do it both before and after you click update; that’s how you need to determine what is changing when you click the button.

This is definitely a data issue, but it’s not clear to me whether it’s different data that is saved at different times, or when some amount of cached data is cleared, or something else, but I do think that is the kind of work you need to do.

Ok, downloading the data tables to test as you describe.

But what about this new issue of a second post being created, rather than the plugin editing the existing one? Thought you had it designed that it was locked in place that one asset in SF was assigned to a single post, which is why I couldn’t update after deleting all the posts.

Tested again and another minor edit is creating an additional post, leaving us with three versions of the same item. I have “pull to drafts” selected: “If selected, WordPress will check for matches against existing drafts of this object type, and will also update existing drafts.” That’s clearly not happening. Would seem that this issue needs to be resolved, as there’s no way to check what’s happening with edits on an existing post when new ones are being created every time.

Tried unchecking the “pull to drafts” setting, as I remembered that I used one of the snippets in our functions file for automatically saving as published and may not have had that setting checked as a result. However, it didn’t matter as its still creating an additional post with every edit.

Here’s the snippet in case that’s relevant:

// syncing data from salesforce -- changes default to publish
add_filter( 'object_sync_for_salesforce_pull_params_modify', 'change_pull_params', 10, 6 );
function change_pull_params( $params, $mapping, $object, $sf_sync_trigger, $use_soap, $is_new ) {
	$params['post_status'] = array(
		'value' => 'publish',
		'method_modify' => 'wp_update_post',
		'method_read' => 'get_post',
	);
	return $params;
}