Aras losing data

Hi Riaan,

hard to tell. It´s already a good start that you found hints regarding rollbacks. 

Does the data loss affect all ItemTypes or just CAD?
Does it happen randomly or on a regular basis?
Does it happen at certain times a day?
Is your CAD interface (if CAD is mostly affected) used by multiple persons at the same time?

In the past we had data loss (=data seemed to be updated but wasn´t) when database collapsed due to to many parallel connection to the SQL server. This was caused by specific file operations (e.g. display thumbnails in the grid or download of ZIP packages with many single files). In this case user noticed that database freezed. Innovator worked, but users couldn´t refresh the grid cause the file operations blocked everything. Not sure if this one fits your description. 

Hi Angela,

Thank you for being so active on the forum!

No, it is actually Parts that goes missing, the CAD and their associated files are still there. Documents does not seem to be affected.

It does happen quite randomly, some days is does not happen at all, other days quite a few times. So this makes debugging a bit of a challenge.

It happens at any time during the workday.

I am still in a test phase with this, so there is only one person using it full-time. Unfortunately he can be a bit absent-minded, which is not ideal.

I know this sounds impossible, but I think more than one generations of a part disappears. I will start comparing the database backups and see.

Even the History of the parts does not reflect the missing part revisions. This guided me to it being a SQL issue, and the possibility of transactions not being committed, but rolled back.

Kind Regards

Riaan

Which Innovator version do you use?

Properly not your reason, but we experienced it in the past: Are your affected parts really "gone", or do users just don´t see them?

It can be simply a permission issue. Or if user are allowed to use custom item numbering, they sometimes make mistakes (e.g. add leading spaces, tabs or other hidden characters, especially when the data is copy&pasted from Excel).
In this case users cannot find their parts any more or the parts may appear at the end of the list after users created them. In this case check the db if it contains recent Parts that contain unusual properties.

If the item_number (or other properties users user for searching) are corrupted, it´s also harder to find the entry in the history, cause it affects the keyed_name too. 

This issue happened so often in our environment, that I added a custom js function to a lot of Form fields just to check and remove invisible characters. 

Other ideas:

Do you use federated data in your ItemType or in ItemType relationships? Or in secondary ItemTypes that reference to Part? There are some scenarios where federation can block other functions from being executed.

The Part ItemType by default executes a lot of side Methods, especially in the relationships. It can happend that some of them are not executed due to errors but users don´t notice that something went wrong. So it´s really important to catch every possible error. I remember sometimes LifeCycle "Post" methods or some secondary Methods in "Part BOM" weren´t executed, but no error message was thrown. 

Which Innovator version do you use?

Properly not your reason, but we experienced it in the past: Are your affected parts really "gone", or do users just don´t see them?

It can be simply a permission issue. Or if user are allowed to use custom item numbering, they sometimes make mistakes (e.g. add leading spaces, tabs or other hidden characters, especially when the data is copy&pasted from Excel).
In this case users cannot find their parts any more or the parts may appear at the end of the list after users created them. In this case check the db if it contains recent Parts that contain unusual properties.

If the item_number (or other properties users user for searching) are corrupted, it´s also harder to find the entry in the history, cause it affects the keyed_name too. 

This issue happened so often in our environment, that I added a custom js function to a lot of Form fields just to check and remove invisible characters. 

Other ideas:

Do you use federated data in your ItemType or in ItemType relationships? Or in secondary ItemTypes that reference to Part? There are some scenarios where federation can block other functions from being executed.

The Part ItemType by default executes a lot of side Methods, especially in the relationships. It can happend that some of them are not executed due to errors but users don´t notice that something went wrong. So it´s really important to catch every possible error. I remember sometimes LifeCycle "Post" methods or some secondary Methods in "Part BOM" weren´t executed, but no error message was thrown.