Known issues and related workflows or work-arounds

Does David pay to fix something or have staff learn to work around some problems? Here is a list of problems we currently are choosing to work around. If they get worse, report the deteriorating situation to David so he can work with ChemIT to decide if it's worth fixing the problem.

When the WebApp cannot contact Kuali Financial System (KFS), the system cannot process any orders using Cornell accounts

This failure occurred 12/5/16. Stockroom and NMR kiosks out of service, for all practical purposes since the vast majority of all transactions at the Stockroom require looking up Cornell accounts. (Exceptions are cash and local account sales.) As are all the transactions at the NMR kiosk.

• During the failure, the stockroom fell back on recording purchases on paper. And physically limiting access into the stockroom via locked door.

ChemIT ticket number: INC000001829782 - Stockroom - Issues with Kiosks

Summary: Apparently about 2 years ago CIT deprecated the URL we were using in our WebApp and didn't inform us or others on campus, nor did they document they added an alias. This weekend, Cornell moved KFS to  Amazon Web Services (AWS). The move to AWS broke the aliases to their deprecated URLs, and this broke our URL and at least one other system on campus, and surprised CIT staff. The removal of aliases to deprecated URLs will also break connections for folks using old URLs to the KFS service when using the KFS browser-based tools, which is why they should not depend on "deep" URLs and instead use top-level URLs such as <kfs.cornell.ed> or the like. That is not an option for our system.

Specifics of our system: Cornell's KFS a system is used by our Linux Apache PHP WebApp system to read-only validate the Cornell accounts entered when someone makes a purchase. This is using a KFS service called "web services", or "wsdl". When that look-up fails (usually because of an actual non-active account), the logic of the system won't process the request. This morning, cash (and presumably any non-KFS accounts we use locally) transactions worked fine.

To consider doing: Add logic to our WebApp so it is more tolerant of failures connecting to KFS. And mark the transaction record as having an unverified account, as appropriate. David can initiate that investment with Brightworks if he feels it is worth getting a quote and possibly doing this.

Risk profile: Without Chemistry IT's specific staff's availability and engagement this morning, the Stockroom (and now NMR) system would have been likely down for a much, much longer time and more folks would have been aggravated. And it would have cost the Stockroom much, much more money to get fixed ($1,000+?). Here are some specific contributions made by Chemistry IT staff members this morning:

• Michael Hint: First responser and characterized what worked and didn't work. Initially looked at WebApp logs. Knew and communicated that KFS made change made over the weekend by reading and remembering email from prior week.
• Lulu Zhu: Looked through logs further. Found and changed applicable code.
• Oliver Habicht: Connected with correct campus service providers in a manner which hopefully more quickly found the root problem and got us a solution.

Web kiosk interface not properly sized to aspect ratio and resolution of kiosk monitors

The "non-NetID" option is off-screen on the bottom, so uses must know this and look to scroll.

Intended to get fixed with Stockroom POS software enhancement, started April 2014.

Errors reported by QuickBooks WebConnector: Ignore

For details, see ChemIT ticket number INC000000954408 (Brightworks Ticket#54621).

Errors we've safely ignored in the past:

• 3000: The given object ID
• Error connecting to QuickBooks - close any modal dialog in QuickBooks. (10/21/2013)

(Idea: Merge above info with below info?)