Attendee Information of type TEXT not working

[Ryan]

In short, “Text” fields aren’t recording to the database when a user registers. This is part of the “Attendee Information” where we’ve added extra questions/fields. There are 3 checkboxes, and a dropdown in addition to 2 text fields. The checkboxes and dropdown selection are working as expected. The problem is the Text fields are omitted completely. They are not written to the database (assumed _tribe_tickets_meta in postmeta table), and certainly do not show on the emails the registrant gets. We’ve updated to the latest versions of Event Tickets and Event TIckets Plus, 4.8.1. Please advise.

[Support Droid]

Hi! Thanks for reaching out. We’re experiencing a high volume of support requests right now, but please do bear with us and we’ll review your question as quickly as possible.

[Ryan]

I felt like I was missing something, so for peace of mind and to rule out any plugin/theme conflict I may have overlooked, I created a replica of my RSVP Tickets on a fresh install of WordPress. This particular issue was still present in a clean install, my text fields won’t record to the database.

Now, I took it a step further and tested a new RSVP ticket on this install, very basic. I used short labels and basic Yes/No radio answers for good measure. To my surprise, Text fields with short labels in this case worked fine.

I further tested various lengths of labels of Text fields, and found the sweet spot to be right in the neighborhood of 70 characters. Labels shorter than 70 characters worked, while labels longer than 70 failed (without error).

In this particular use case, I shortened my labels so that I can collect the data I’m looking for.

I’ve left the ticket open in hopes someone will read this, and escalate the issue to a Bug Report. I did not find this bug on the Known Issues page, hence, why I created this ticket in the first place.

[Andras]

Hi diocesan,

Thanks for reaching out!

I’m sorry to hear about this issue! And I’m really thankful for your thorough testing and sharing the results and the workaround with us.

I will test this as well to make sure I can recreate the issue and we’re facing a bug. If I can recreate this behavior I will open a bugticket so our developers can take a look at this. I will let you know.

Thanks again!

Andras

[Andras]

Could you share with me what were the short and long labels you have used for the text field?

What info were you submitting in the fields?

I ran a quick test with RSVP, having a text field with less than 70, and one with more than 70 (89), and a radio button. And I got all the info.

Thanks,
Adnras

[Ryan]

Here are labels that failed (with no error):
“Do you want to receive text messages about the Family Faith Fest? If so, enter your cell phone number here:”
“If you want to receive text messages about Fest, enter your cell number:”

Here are labels that were successful:
“Test”
“If you are affiliated with a local parish, enter parish name:”
“Want to receive text messages about Fest, enter your cell number:”

Input did not matter, as I was using a lot of “asdf” and “test”.

[Andras]

Hi Ryan,

Thanks for sharing those.

I tested all the long ones, even having two long ones on the same in put field and every submission got properly recorded. Even when using multi-line and / or required.

Here’s a screenshot of my last setup and results: https://dl.dropbox.com/s/7us81ose1i46urp/shot_181003_214348.jpg

Is there anything that stands out or is much different from your setup?

Not quite sure what could be the issue here. Might be – though I find it unlikely – that one of the other plugins are interfering. You can find that out by running a conflict test.

Best is if you have a staging / test site where you can play around without affecting your live site.

The other option would be setting up a site from zero, first adding the ticketing plugins, test if it works and add the other plugins and theme one-by-one while testing the functionality after every step.

If you decide to troubleshoot this further, then let me know what you find. Or you can use your workaround of shorter labels.

Cheers,
Andras

[Ryan]

Andras,

Thank you for looking into this. Trust me when I tell you I’ve done all the conflict testing and various labels I could think of prior to creating this ticket. I even went as far as a brand new clean install, 2017 theme, and only the Events plugins. The problem persisted just like I described, so I know it’s not a Theme or Plugin conflict.

Now, up to that point, all of my testing had been done on the same server that I identified the behavior. For good measure, I repeated the clean install setup and tests on another server of ours. The other server did not exhibit the issue that I described, and behaved and succeeded like your tests. Even the very long ones were working.

In conclusion, it appears what I’ve discovered is not a bug with plugin after all, but rather some sort of WordPress/Server/Meta/Database issue that does not throw an error or break the rest of the ticket. Very strange. I’ll leave it as is for now, as that’s not really anything you can troubleshoot.

[Andras]

Hey Ryan,

Thanks for getting back to me on that.

Wow, that is some good amount of testing you did. Thanks for that and for sharing the results. Not a lot of our users go to this length of trying to find the source of an issue.

I’ll reach out to one of our technical guys to see if they have an idea about this.

Do you know if you are on a Microsoft server or a Linux one?

Andras

[Ryan]

Andras,

Both servers are Linux. Unfortunately, the one that the ticket fields worked on is the newer of the two, and is running newer versions of nearly everything (CentOS, PHP, Apache). I realize that is going to be awfully difficult to find the issue given so many variables.

I was looking for the section of Event Tickets or Event Tickets Plus that stores the additional information to meta. I found several possible sections between Meta.php, Storage.php, and Tickets.php, but nothing was a slam dunk as to the exact spot these get handled. If I knew where it was, I could at least see if there what filters or functions surrounding it that might be a PHP version quirk or something odd.

[Andras]

Hey Ryan,

I think you can find what you are looking for it in this file:

wp-content/plugins/event-tickets-plus/src/Tribe/Meta.php

Line 279 has ‘function save_meta()’.

I will keep this open for the time being in case you would like to report your findings.

Cheers,
Andras

[Support Droid]

Hey there! This thread has been pretty quiet for the last three weeks, so we’re going to go ahead and close it to avoid confusion with other topics. If you’re still looking for help with this, please do open a new thread, reference this one and we’d be more than happy to continue the conversation over there.

Thanks so much!
The Events Calendar Support Team

[Author]

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