Organizer and venue search not working

[Andreas]

Hi, members of a modern tribe

My calendar seems to have a problem with search.

• While editing an event and when entering the venue or organizer, the combobox offering me choices is empty, doesn’t search (in fact, it always reads “searching…” no matter how long I wait) and only allows me to create a new entry.
• When searching near a specific location (e.g. in list view, see https://derwis.ch and try “Biel”), search always returns no results, even if I pick a location for which I know there’s a venue.

I have more than 1000 venues in my DB, but only two dozen organizers, though. Venues, organizers, then events were all created using a CSV imports. I had this behavior right from the start, when I was playing with the free version of TEC still.

Also, removing the site, reinstalling WP and all plug-ins, then importing again doesn’t seem to help. I’m running the latest WP version and plug-ins (release of this week) on PHP 7.0.30 (7.2.x in development environment).

Do you know what could be causing this behavior?

Thanks a lot for your help,
Cheers
Andreas

[Jennifer]

Hi Andreas,

Thanks for reaching out!

On the event edit page when searching for a venue, are you entering the name of the venue or searching by the city? In this search box, you will need to enter the name. Can you verify if this gets you the venue names?

For the front end search, I tested this out on my end, and I was getting results when searching for “Biel”, I am getting some results (see screenshot). Were you able to get this resolved?

When you mentioned that you were running into this issue from the beginning, was this before having so many venues in your database? Having a large number of venues can result in some lag when searching.

If you haven’t done so already, you’ll also want to run through the steps outlined here to see if you are still running into this issue with all other plugins disabled and a default theme (like Twenty Seventeen) enabled.

I would recommend installing the free Query Monitor plugin and trying to recreate the issue on the edit event page (in a default environment). This will help identify any issues that might be occurring.

Please let me know what you find!

Thanks,

Jennifer

[Andreas]

Hi Jennifer

Thank you for your answer.

Yes, search on the front-end is indeed working. For venues I also do get proper results – not sure what I saw (or actually didn’t see) there before. I find searching for date a bit odd in List view, as I not only get events for the date I’ve searched for, but also for future dates (see first screenshot). But alas, I can live with that, it’s merely a design decision.

But search on the event edit page seems broken for me:
– If a venue or organizer is set, that’s not shown (see second screenshot). Values are set, however, as they show up on the actual event page. Also, for organizers, the “trash” icon is shown allowing me to remove the value.
– If I search for “Biel” as venue (what you tried in the front-end), I don’t get a result. I’m only offered to add “Biel” as new venue (see third screenshot).
– If I just open the combobox, I see the spinner reading “Searching…”, but nothing else happens. I would have expected to see e.g. the first 5 entries of the alphabetically sorted list of venues.

Do you have any other reports like that?

I’ll try again to disable all plug-ins and switch to a default theme. I’ll also have a look at the Query Monitor plugin after that.

Thanks for your help
Andreas

[Andreas]

Update: I turned off all plug-ins, but the mandatory ones (see screenshot). I also switched to the raw TwentySeventeen day. I still see the search issues on the event edit page.

[Andreas]

Update 2: the search effect on the event edit page happens on Safari and Firefox on Mac (latest versions). On Firefox, there’s actually a JS error showing up in the console of the web developer tools (see screenshot), as soon as I open the combobox.

[Jennifer]

Thanks for the updates!

First, just to clarify, the search for venues on the backend is not quite as robust as the search on the front…you will need to search by the venue name, not the city. Opening the search box should show you some options without having to search. If venues and organizers have been saved and are showing up on the front end, then they certainly should be showing on the backend!

I know you tried disabling your theme and other plugins previously and were still seeing this issue, but can you try again with the Twenty Seventeen theme enabled and all other plugins disabled besides The Events Calendar (at the same time) to see if you’re still getting that error?

[Andreas]

This reply is private.

[Jennifer]

This reply is private.

[Andreas]

Hi Jennifer

Thanks for your reply.

I’m curious: why is it that you‘re not allowed to connect to user sites, even if you‘re given permission and rights to do so? Does that only apply for production sites, or all types of sites, e.g. dev and staging sites as well? I‘m asking because I wonder how you‘re able to reproduce reported issues, if you can only do so by attempting to recreate a specific setup. It seems to me that this makes it tough to track down hard-to-reproduce bugs… Just asking, I‘m sure you have your reasons.

Anyway, I did what you asked me to do. Or actually, I tried to do that.

I manually created a new venue: https://derwis.ch/veranstaltungsort/aarenau/ https://derwis.ch/veranstaltungsort/aarenau/
I manually created a new event: https://derwis.ch/event/aarenau-openair-2020/ https://derwis.ch/event/aarenau-openair-2020/

The idea was to make this event take place at the newly created venue. Unfortunately, I couldn’t realize that, since I can neither select nor search, then select the venue in the edit view of the event.

As before, searching for the venue name only gives me the option to create a new venue with that name.

From my point of view, we can look at two things now:
As you suggested, something might have gone wrong during the import.
The other issue that could be causing this is the fact that I install WP and the TEC plug-in using composer. Maybe something is missing or broken there?

I’ll send you both the .csv files and the composer files in a separate, private post.

Thank you very much for your help

[Andreas]

Hi Jennifer

Thanks for your reply.

I’m curious: why is it that you‘re not allowed to connect to user sites, even if you‘re given permission and rights to do so? Does that only apply for production sites, or all types of sites, e.g. dev and staging sites as well? I‘m asking because I wonder how you‘re able to reproduce reported issues, if you can only do so by attempting to recreate a specific setup. It seems to me that this makes it tough to track down hard-to-reproduce bugs… Just asking, I‘m sure you have your reasons.

Anyway, I did what you asked me to do. Or actually, I tried to do that.

• I manually created a new venue: https://derwis.ch/veranstaltungsort/aarenau/
• I manually created a new event: https://derwis.ch/event/aarenau-openair-2020/

The idea was to make this event take place at the newly created venue. Unfortunately, I couldn’t realize that, since I can neither select nor search, then select the venue in the edit view of the event (see image1.png).

As before, searching for the venue name only gives me the option to create a new venue with that name (see image2.png).

From my point of view, we can look at two things now:
As you suggested, something might have gone wrong during the import.
The other issue that could be causing this is the fact that I install WP and the TEC plug-in using composer. Maybe something is missing or broken there?

I’ll send you both the .csv files and the composer files in a separate, private post.

Thank you very much for your help
Andreas

[Andreas]

This reply is private.

[Jennifer]

This reply is private.

[Andreas]

Hi Jennifer

I got this working again for now, although I still have some work ahead to make sure it also works with actual data.

I first tried by uninstalling all plugins, but not WordPress itself. I then only installed the free-version of TEC (leaving out Pro). All data was still there, but the comboboxes still would not work. When I checked the browser console, I detected two errors that keep appearing when I open the comboboxes to set an organizer or venue (see two attached screenshots).

I then completely wiped my site by deleting all database tables, WordPress, as well as all plugins. I reinstalled using composer. Then I went ahead and did what you’ve suggested: I created an organizer and venues manually first. The comboboxes then worked as expected when I added my first event.

I’ll now try to import the previous events (or maybe a subset thereof). If the comboboxes keep on working then this might indeed be because I never created items manually before trying an import.

I keep you posted.

Cheers
Andreas

– TEC plugins deinstalliert
– TEC free version über WP neu installiert (Pro nicht)
– alle Daten noch da
– Select in Edit view funktioniert nach wie vor nicht.
– Browser Konsole zeigt Fehler (s. Screenshots)

– DB komplett gelöscht, Neuinstallation über Composer, dann erst einen Event, Veranstalter und Veranstaltungsort manuell erzeugt -> Comboboxes funktionieren.

[Andreas]

Sorry, please disregard the text below my name in my previous post. That was a copy+paste leftover… 😉

[Andreas]

Hi Jennifer

Interesting. I re-imported only the 70+ organizers from the original CSV. As a result of this, the combobox for selecting the organizer in the edit view of the manually added event stopped working (see two screenshots attached to this entry).

So I now have 1 manually added event, organizer and venue each, plus 70+ imported organizers. The combobox for selecting the venue works, the one for the organizer no longer functions.

Not sure what could be the reason for this. I’m running on the latest WP 4.9.8 and TEC plugin versions. I’ll try to redo the above, but this time with the DEBUG flag enabled.

Cheers
Andreas

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