Issue Details
On 7/3/2019 we were made aware of an issue where Reporting Categories were still displayed in the Management Portal after being deleted. We believe the issue had been introduced to an update made approximately 12 months ago. They were still available to view throughout the Management Portal, including:
- The "Settings -> Configuration -> Reporting" page
- The category selection dropdown on the Items page
- Within reporting
On week commencing 18/3/2019 we released an update to fix the issue. This fix was to make Reporting Categories that had previously to correctly not show.
As the issue had been present for some time, this resulted in users assigning inventory Items to Reporting Categories which had been deleted but were available to select. After we fixed the issue, these deleted Reporting Categories (and in turn any linked Items) were now not showing. A user could have deleted the Reporting Category up to a year prior so understandably had no recollection of deleting the Reporting Category.
We did envisage this situation and as part of the update developed a script to undo the deletion of any categories which had active items assigned to them.
It appears the script did not undo the deletion on all categories as intended. This resulted in Items and Reporting Categories which were previously showing in the Management Portal, no longer being visible. Updating configuration in the VestiPOS App, also resulted in these Items not being available to sell.
Our Initial Response
We are able to restore the deleted Reporting Categories as requested. To minimise impact, we prioritised any support issues related to this and completed this within 15 minutes for every customer who has reached out to our support team.
Fix
On 27/3/2019 we released an update which:
- Restored all previously deleted Reporting Categories which are linked to an active Item
- Prepended **** to the name of any Reporting Category which we deleted to help identify them
This was applied to all customers. For the majority of customers they will not have been impacted or have noticed the issue prior to us releasing this fix.
What steps do I now need to do?
As we have fixed the underlying issue, this issue should not reoccur as it's no longer possible to select Reporting Categories which have been deleted.
Optionally, we suggest reviewing your account for any previously deleted Reporting Categories. This is to clean up any conflicts and will have no impact on your ability to view/sell affected Items. You can do this by:
- Navigate to "Settings -> Configuration -> Reporting" in the Management Portal
- If you don't have any Reporting Categories starting with **** then this issue hasn't impacted your account and no further action is required. Otherwise:
- Review each Reporting Category starting with **** and for each:
If the Reporting Category should be deleted: You will need to reassign any Items which are assigned to it to alternative categories.
If the Reporting Category should be kept: Simply rename the Reporting Category to remove the asterisks.
After making the above changes, we recommend performing a configuration sync on all terminals.
Review
On reflection:
- This issue has resulted in zero data loss
- The issue was resolved within 15 minutes for any customers who contacted our support team
- We have applied a resolution to all customers
- We have resolved the underlying issue
However, we will still be reviewing our internal processes to learn from how this issue wasn't detected in our testing procedures. We will implement any improvements to our internal procedures identified on this review. We would like to apologise for any inconvenience this issue caused.
If you have any further questions or experience any issues, please do not hesitate to contact us.