Appointment cancelled or moved by a student

Appointment cancelled or moved by a student

by Sue Moss -
Number of replies: 10

Please can you help me?  I have a scheduler set up on my Moodle which is being used extensively but recently we've come across a problem that when a student books an appointment it is creating the appointment and then immediately cancelling it.  This was happening for every student that booked an appointment but they definitely weren't cancelling it.

I recreated the scheduler and started a new one and this seemed to resolve the problem for a while but now it is starting to appear again, this time on an intermittent  basis.  Its not giving any errors or anything, as far as the student is concerned they've booked that appointment. 

Any help as to what is going on and how to resolve it would be greatly appreciated.  

Moodle version: Moodle 2.8.6 (Build: 20150511) 

Scheduler version: 2014090102,    2.7.1

Many thanks

Average of ratings: -
In reply to Sue Moss

Re: Appointment cancelled or moved by a student

by Henning Bostelmann -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Plugin developers

Hello

when you say that the student is "creating an appointment and then immediately cancelling it", what exactly happens at that moment? (Do you possibly mean: The teacher receives an e-mail that the appointment has been created, and then another e-mail that the appointment has been cancelled?)

As far as I understand your question, the student sees that the appointment has been booked. When at that point, you look at the teacher's view of the same scheduler, does the appointment show up as being booked or not?

Average of ratings: -
In reply to Henning Bostelmann

Re: Appointment cancelled or moved by a student

by Sue Moss -

Hi 

The student books the appointment as all looks ok.  The time slot has been saved and their name is against it.

The teacher receives an e-mail that the appointment has been created, and then another e-mail immediately after saying that the appointment has been cancelled. When she goes into the scheduler there is no appointment scheduled for that student. 

When the student goes back into scheduler there is no booked appointment and their slot is open for bookings.  

Hope this is a bit clearer.


Average of ratings: -
In reply to Sue Moss

Re: Appointment cancelled or moved by a student

by Henning Bostelmann -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Plugin developers

Hi

Thanks for adding that information. I still struggle to reproduce the problem on my side - i.e., for me it works -, so let me ask a few further questions:

Just to exclude the obvious, is it possible that the student, maybe by mistake, clicks the "drop my appointments" button directly after clicking "save my choice"? As this would exactly produce the effect you describe. Note that the buttons are located directly next to each other.

Also, two emails would be generated if the student changes their booking to a different slot - although here the cancellation email would be slightly earlier than the one about the new booking.

If it's none of these, can you tell me more about the configuration of your scheduler? Are students allowed to book only one slot, or several? Can the slots take only one student, or several? Is group scheduling enabled?

Average of ratings: -
In reply to Henning Bostelmann

Re: Appointment cancelled or moved by a student

by Sue Moss -

Hi

Students are definitely not clicking drop my appointments, as far as they are concerned they still think they have an appointment. I've used a dummy student and tried it too with the same results.  I've also tried booking the appointment but not saving my choice in case they were doing that too, but then it didn't send any emails at all.

Configuration: Slots are for only one student, group scheduling is not enabled.  Now changed to allowed 10 slots - this was unlimited but looked at previous issues and changed to 10. I still got the intermittent error on that day which was when I raised it here, but having just checked with the teacher concerned it seems to have settled down after that date so changing that setting and allowing time to clear any cached settings may have resolved the issue?

Thanks for your help, I'll shout if it happens again smile

Sue


Average of ratings: -
In reply to Sue Moss

Re: Appointment cancelled or moved by a student

by Sue Moss -

OK not resolved, its just happened again sad

So a bit of history:  Scheduler has been in place on this course for the past year. Last year (running on Moodle 2.6) all was fine, students were introduced to the scheduler and it was soon being widely used.  We did a upgrade to Moodle over the summer (to 2.8 - version details above) and when the students returned in September and started using the scheduler we had problems with this happening to every student.  I scrolled the forums here and tried various tweaks (ie, unlimited to 10, making sure no groups etc) but couldn't find a resolution.  

So I created a new scheduler, populated all the appointments etc.  All worked fine for a few weeks but then we've started noticing the odd student having problems - as I said, its currently an intermittent problem in this one. I changed unlimited to 10 appointments. Several students have booked since then and all was starting to look ok, but its just cancelled the appointment of the latest student to book.  I have been able to rebook the students onto their cancelled slot and then its booked it no problem so it doesn't even appear to be the slot that is the issue. 

This course has over a 1000 students on it as its open for all our current students to be able to book an appointment with Cross College Support, and it is a well used resource. I've looked to see if there is any link between the students that are being cancelled (ie, have they booked before, is it just our new intake or is it affecting our returning students. have they booked appointments before) but there is no link that I can see. It not even a case of its hitting every 10 students that try to book.

At a complete loss of what to try next. We have another course with a site wide scheduler that all our students can use for booking careers appointments and this one may also be experiencing these problems (although its also not so heavily used so hard to tell)

Sue 


 



Average of ratings: -
In reply to Sue Moss

Re: Appointment cancelled or moved by a student

by Henning Bostelmann -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Plugin developers

Hi Sue, sorry to hear that the problem isn't resolved yet. I read through the code at that point, and I'm not sure where the behaviour might come from. There are situations when Scheduler sends a cancellation e-mail and then a notification of a new appointment, but as far as I can see in the code, it always happens in this order - cancellation first. As I'm currently without a further clue, can I ask you to look into the log files? First, this would be the Moodle log of the relevant scheduler (see Scheduler administration -> Logs). Look for the relevant time when the problem happened, you can also filter by user. I would be interested whether you see a relevant event "scheduler booking added", " scheduler booking removed", or both, or none; if both, in which order they occur. Then, if you have access to them, look at the web server logs. I'd like to know whether at the relevant time, there appears a URL that has the words "scheduler" and "disengage" in it - and if so, whether this comes from the same  ip address as the user that made the booking (cf Moodle log). Sorry for not having something more concrete right now.








Average of ratings: -
In reply to Henning Bostelmann

Re: Appointment cancelled or moved by a student

by Sue Moss -

Thank you for your time on this.  

Looking at the logs they show the booking has been made and then that the booking has been removed, even though I did this booking and know that I did not remove it.  The IP address stays the same for all of these entries. 

 


Average of ratings: -
In reply to Henning Bostelmann

Re: Appointment cancelled or moved by a student

by Sue Moss -

more logs attached - for web logs from scheduler for 15th Sept and Moodle logs for scheduler for 15th Sept.  Hope these help


Average of ratings: -
In reply to Sue Moss

Re: Appointment cancelled or moved by a student

by Henning Bostelmann -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Plugin developers

Hello Sue

thanks for the log files. Yes, I think that has indeed helped. It appears the following has happened:

After you clicked "Save my choice", your choice was correctly saved, a "new booking" e-mail generated, and the booking screen was again displayed to you. However, immediately afterwards, the page was then reloaded (but this time as a GET rather than POST request, to mention the details). Why this happened isn't clear to me - I reproduced it by clicking into the address bar of the browser and hitting "Enter", but maybe it's some browser feature unknown to me? In any case, this triggered a bug in Scheduler so that the choice was saved again, but this time with an empty list of slots. Hence your booking was cancelled.

I have made a little change to the 2.7 version of Scheduler so that the problem should no longer occur. It's available from the MOODLE_27_STABLE branch on github. Would you mind installing this on your (test) system in order to see whether it works for you?

Average of ratings: -
In reply to Henning Bostelmann

Re: Appointment cancelled or moved by a student

by Sue Moss -

This seems to have worked.  Have tried it on one that was guaranteed to throw this error every time and so far I have managed to book several appointments. 

Thank you big grin

Average of ratings: -