mtreherne

Hi there. I’m very sorry for the long delay getting back to you. I am usually notified of new support threads. But I seem to have missed a couple.

Could you confirm that you still wish to use the plugin (or would like to).

I can then help diagnose the problem, assuming it has persisted.

Regards,
Matt

Hi Mel,

Sorry for taking a while to get back to you. I should get notified of support threads but I seem to have missed a couple. So I’m catching up now.

You may well have resolved this for yourself by now.

On each product you can specify a tag. The tag can be whatever you wish. I would suggest that it individually identifies the product, or perhaps a group of products (depending on how you wish to use the tag in ActiveCampaign). If you have got this setup already and the tags are appearing in ActiveCampaign then you are pretty much done with the configuration of WC-AC-Hook.

After this you will need to setup ‘Automations’ within ActiveCampaign to do certain things when the tags are created (or removed) i.e. send an email. This is a whole subject in its own right. While I’m happy to point you in the right direction, I can’t really provide support on how to write ‘Automations’. You’ll need to get a basic understanding from the ActiveCampaign help/support material on this topic.

Anyway let me know where you have got to in the configuration, and if I can be of any help then of course I will try.

Regards,
Matt

Hi Jim – thanks for getting in touch. Yes I would think that is both possible and a good idea. It’s a little more than a trivial change so I can’t promise when it might be developed, but I’ll make sure it’s on my list of enhancements.

Hi monoogie – your problem maybe unrelated (so we might need to start another thread) but can you get back to me with the following first.

When you manually create orders the hook is not triggered on first creation (see FAQs for info on when contact is created on AC), so that may be your problem. Please can you change the status and update one of your test orders, and then check the log.

Let me know how you get on, and when you get back to me (assuming the problem is not resolved) can you let me know the settings you have for ‘Add/Update Contact’ and ‘Track Order Status’ (these are the plug in settings for WC-AC Hook under WooCommerce > Settings > Integration >WC-AC Hook). Are either of these checked?

Hi Jurenka. The first thing to do is to make sure that you have setup logging. Then I can check what is going on.

On the WooCommerce > Settings > Integration > WC-AC Hook page, please can you make sure that the ‘Debug Log’ is checked to enable logging.

You can then view the log under WooCommerce > System Status > Logs, by viewing the log that starts ‘wc-ac-hook’.

Let me know what it says on the next order (or change of order status).

Ok I suspect I have found the problem, but would be grateful if you could test it for me (I have tested on single site installations but do not have a multisite installation to hand).

The problem seems to be that the WC-AC Hook plugin was checking that the WooCommerce plugin was active before doing anything. Unfortunately the check needs to be slightly different for multisite installations.

One file has been updated, that you will need to install using whichever methods suits you i.e. FTP or your site control panel or SSH or SVN. If you need any guidance then get back to me.

The file can be downloaded from:

https://plugins.svn.www.ads-software.com/wc-ac-hook/branches/multisite/wc-ac-hook.php

and should replace the same named file on your site in the folder:

wp-content/plugins/wc-ac-hook

Let me know how you get on and I will formally update the plug if your test is successful.

Thanks, Matthew.

Ok Menno, I’ve been checking multisite documentations to see if there is anything obvious that the plug-in is not doing. I have a few more questions regarding your setup to help me along. In particular to check what you are seeing when doing Network Admin versus individual Site Admin.

1. Do you have WooCommerce plugin setup as network activated (i.e. all sites) or did you activate on a per site basis?

2. Same question for wc-ac-hook. Did you install this plugin as network activated (i.e. all sites) or did you activate on a per site basis?

3. Do you administer ALL WooCommerce settings on a per site basis? i.e. you don’t have any other plugins that allow you to control any WC settings across your network of sites?

4. On each individual/sub site within your multisite network, do you see both the WooCommerce and WC-AC-Hook plugins listed as active and do neither plugin have a settings link (or just WooCommerce)?

5. On any individual/sub site within your multisite network, if you click on the WooCommerce > Settings > Integrations tab is anything at all shown?

Thanks, Matthew.

Couple of questions for you before I get started. Did the plugin install correctly? i.e. is the WC-AC Hook plugin listed under your plugins and is the plugin active?

Assuming it is installed and active what happens when you click on the WC-AC Hook settings link from the plugins page?

Thanks,
Matthew

Hi there. No I don’t have an immediate answer, sorry.

The plugin is fine on WC 2.6.1 so as you say it is most likely something to do with WP multisite not playing nicely with WC or the plugin.

As a starting point, I’ll review all the guidelines for setting up WooCommerce plug-ins and make sure that I have not missed anything (or if anything has changed) particularly in respect to multisite installations.

I’ll take a look tomorrow, and keep you posted, as I try and narrow down what could cause this problem.

Not currently. The order status of ‘refunded’ is not even tracked (like the other status changes) let alone removing product tags.

I will look into this (I need to do a bit of testing) and decide the best way to handle it. In particular I need to test how best to handle partial refunds as well as total refunds.

My initial view was that refunds were exceptional and best handled manually, but I agree it would be good to track the ‘refunded’ status in some way automatically. I just need to find a way that is flexible enough for everyone.

Hi there,

No I can’t draw many conclusions yet. In fact it is back to the drawing board. Please can you read through the following and pass onto your programmer, to get his thoughts. I have a couple of questions at the bottom as well.

Firstly, let me run through an overview how the wc-ac-hook code flows, just to get us on the same page. So that you can understand my thinking with respect to diagnosing the problem.

There are two woocommerce hooks that trigger action (i.e. trigger calls to the wc-ac-hook).

woocommerce_order_status_changed (everytime the status of an order is changed)
woocommerce_checkout_update_order_meta (everytime a new order is created)

When either of the above happens the wc-ac-hook is triggered and goes through the following steps:

1. Retrieves and validates order details
2. Retrieves meta data for each product on order
3. Instantiates ActiveCampaign class and does AC API credentials_test
4. Syncs contact (2 api calls using AC API contact/view & contact/sync)
5. Removes tags (1 api call using AC API contact/tag_remove)
6. Calls WC_Logger for debug log

Currently I have setup timing of steps 3, 4 and 5 (i.e. the four API calls).

I could add an overall time from steps 1-5 (we’ll have to assume that writing to the debug logs is not the problem). It is simple to do this. I suspect this will tell us nothing new (but you never know).

Just to explain a little more about the four API calls. This is when your server connects to the ActiveCampaign server. Now the way wc-ac-hook works is that it uses a wrapper provided by ActiveCampaign to make the API calls (it saves time using their code and makes sure that it is done right). For your programmer you can see the code for this in the wp-content/plugins/wc-ac-hook/activecampaign-api-php/includes. The Connector.class.php contains the all important curl calls which actually do the HTTP requests between the servers.

Each API call will create a new curl connection (i.e. go through curl_init, curl_setupt, curl_exec, curl_close). The timings I have given are for doing all this. It is not an asynchronous activity (like AJAX). The HTTP requests are made to ActiveCampaign and the code waits for a response. So the timings I have are the time it took to make the call to ActiveCampaign. So I hate to disagree with your programmer, but I do believe those timings are for the API calls (and not internal).

So were do I think we are?

1. On the evidence so far, I have not seen any problems with the response of the ActiveCampaign servers i.e. intermittent delays in connection or response. That does not mean there is not a problem with the plugin, just that it may not be the actual AC API calls that are causing the delay.
2. I can extend the timings from steps 3-5 to include steps 1&2 so that we log the total time that your server spent in the wc-ac-hook code (apart from the final logging of the data).
3. Can you confirm that the 8 seconds happens every time? And by every time that includes do you get this when you manually update the status of an order? The good news is that if your programmer is saying the delay always happens then a) it probably isn’t a problem with ActiveCamapaign server response times, and b) since it can be reproduced we should be able to diagnose this.
4. Can you clarify your typical payment process. I note from your logs that you had orders created (with a status of pending) which where then updated (5 seconds later) to a status of on-hold. What payment providers are you using? (just PayPal?). I would like to understand why the orders are going on-hold, so that I understand your woocommerce setup/configuration a little better.
5. Can you send me a list of all the plug-ins (with versions) that you have installed. It is useful to know this since plugins don’t always play nicely together.

Thanks.

Thanks for the logs. They all look fine with fairly consistent timings and all what you would expect.

Well until we get to the bottom of it, it’s best to keep an open mind, as to what the problem is.

I would suggest leaving this version running so it carries on logging the times. If this is a fault with ActiveCampaign taking too long to respond, it is likely to be an intermittent problem. So it might take some time to see a problem in the logs.

I would certainly get back to your programmer and ask him to do the testing again, and share more details of the results with me, to see if there is anything else I can investigate.

I’ve taken a look through the plugin code to refresh myself, and there are two things I would like to do.

Firstly, I would like to test with some logging to track down the problem API call. I don’t know whether you will be able to do this, but it will obviously speed things up if you can. If you have a test environment great. Otherwise you will have to enable the plugin again, at least for while, to capture a few contact syncs (I presume you have disabled the plugin at the moment).

To do the test, I have created a new version of the plugin (1.2.2) with one file updated. This is not a public release (you won’t get notified to install from wp-admin), so you must install using whichever method suits you i.e. FTP or your site control panel or SSH or SVN.

The plugin can be found at https://plugins.svn.www.ads-software.com/wc-ac-hook/branches/1.2.2/

There is only one file that actually needs to be updated from version 1.2.1 (you can simply download this, save your old version and replace).

https://plugins.svn.www.ads-software.com/wc-ac-hook/branches/1.2.2/includes/sync-contact.php

The file should replace the one in wp-content/plugins/wc-ac-hook/includes

The changes to the code are simply adding logging (to the debug log) to capture the time (in milliseconds) for each API call. There are four API calls for each contact sync. When I did the test last night I was getting 0.3 to 1.3 ms for each call.

The second thing I will do is to get in touch with the ActiveCampaign API developers through their forum. I have been through their code and they do not appear to use any options to control the curl connection or execution timeout. So there is no option to control the timeout simply through a parameter (i.e. it would require developing their code). So I will ask them if they have had any similar experiences (API calls taking many minutes), and whether there is a better option to fail gracefully after a configurable timeout period.

That’s not good. I’ve not come across anything like that before.

I will have a look at the ActiveCampaign API and how the calls are made.

In the meantime, could you do something for me. Confirm the WordPress and WooCommerce versions that you are using.

Can you also let me know if there was any error recorded in the log (assuming Debug Log is enabled):

WooCommerce > System Status > Logs > wc-ac-hook*

Or did it always work – if they waited – but just took a long time?

Thanks for your patience.

Hi there. Let’s see what is going on. Firstly can you login as the WP admin or shop manager and under WooCommerce > Settings > Integration > WC-AC Hook please ensure that the ‘Debug Log’ option is checked.

If it is already checked then great, otherwise you will need to wait for your next order (after enabling debug logging). You can view the log under WooCommerce > System Status > Logs > wc-ac-hook-* (select the log and click on view).

If you have recent entries in the log then we have something to start with. Please let me know what has been reported in the log for the last order.