Recently we have been getting alot of random exceptions from the CommerceManager application, the exception is happening on the DataSet Fill, it appears to be happening everywhere in the app and after a few refreshes the applications resumes normal operation.

We are using eCF 4.1.2.25140

 

Thanks in advance,

Aviad
Netcraft

Can you send us a screenshot and what you were doing on the site before that error occurred? 

Mediachase Software

As i stated before, theres no particular action that triggers that exception. It just randomally happens at least once a day, even on the login screen before you even enter the management system.

Can you include the text of the error?

Mediachase Software

Im attaching a picture of the exception.

Did you do any customizations?  If so, can you tell us what code changes were made?  Was the site running fine for a while and then all of a sudden these errors started appearing? 

We have seen a similar situation in the past when some customizations led to orphaned items. 

You can read more about it - http://www.mediachase.com/Community/forums/thread/3287.aspx

You could try doing a fresh installation with a fresh database to confirm that the base product version you have works fine. 

If you provide us answers to our questions above, we may be able to point you in the right direction.

Mediachase Software

We have made many customizations to the CommerceManager app. I couldn't list the entire changes we have made since there are plenty and they touch almost every aspect of the application. Notice that we haven't changed the Business layer and Data layer and only extended them using classes that inherit from the core.

The customer have been playing around with the virtual page functionality recently and we are using it heavily on that specific website. So i think there is a good lead on that one.

The application used to work without a hitch since April last year and it only started throwing those excxceptions 2 weeks ago.

 

Thanks again for the help,

Aviad
Netcraft

Do you have an update on this?

Mediachase Software

So far it seems like it has completly stopped appearing. Ill keep updating since we are still investigating the issue.

Alright, let us know if this behavior appears again. Thanks.

Mediachase Software

After a certain period of time without having this issue, the problem has returned and this time it happens way more often than the last time. In the duration of 8 hours i had to recycle the IIS app pool more than 5 times to get rid of the issue (it only helped for 30-60mins).

I need an urgent help with the matter.

 

Thanks,

This behavior seemed to go away for a certain period of time. Were there any changes in your code or IIS configuration or other configuration which led to this sudden reappearance of the problem? Can you give us the steps taken to see this error? Can you point us to a URL so that we can see this occuring?

Mediachase Software

Since last time no changes to the code have been made, which makes us strongly belive this is a data integrity.

To reproduce this error all you do is click a link or navigate through pages in the eCF CommerceManager. Every 2-3 hits you will get the same exception.

 

The URL is secured so i will ask for access rights from our sysadmin before posting it.

Just tested on the fresh install and it worked fine. It must be some old code mixed with new code that is causing this.

Looks like another transaction is opened and never completed which causes rollback to be executed.

Is it possible to use a clean database/fresh install and remerge your custom code?

Mediachase Software

This fix was submitted by one of our Solutions Partners.

 

The suggestion of upgrading to .Net 3.5 possibly could have solved this since it appears ADO.Net 2.0 has a bug that causes connections of transaction to get disposed due to a weak reference which makes them uninitialized when needed.

 

There is little information about it on the web but these are the reference links we've worked with:

http://www.jaxidian.org/update/2007/04/06/7/

http://www.ormapper.net/Forums/Default.aspx?part=74&action=thread&id=2450&key=IaC12zYu0ykFv3qP9v11Tg%3d%3d

It seems the exact pattern used in ECF is the one causing the issue, and we've made a few minor changes to the TransactionScope object of ECF to bypass it safely.

Prior to making the change, we got this error every few hours, and that's after recycling the Admin application every 15min and running custom scripts to recycle it when specific perfmon values were achieved. We still had rapid crashes that prevented our customer from working the site.

2 files have been attached - the original + the original with a fix/comments.  After deploying this fix everything went back to normal and we haven't encountered this error ever since. We've also monitored open SQL connections and made sure no leaks or new issues exist.