CC Version 4 To 5 Upgrade VAT Rules Not Applied

[petecube]

At the begining of August I upgraded a store for an existing client from version 4.3.7 up to the latest version 5.2.2 before I upgraded the live store I did a test upgrade locally under WAMP on my old desktop PC running Win XP Pro.

 

When I ran the test upgrade the script iterated through every version in order from version 4.3.7 throught to 5.2.2 in chronological order to complete the process, and everything seemed to work OK, apart from no product images, which I expected anyway,
due to the Windows environment.

 

So after backing up all the existing store files and the database I then uploaded all of the files for the latest version to over write the existing store files following the instructions in the knowledge base on the Cube Cart site and ran the upgrade.

 

During the upgrade process on the live store the upgrade script iterated through each version from the exisitng version 4.3.7 to 5.2.2, but this time it skipped a few versions during the process, when the upgrade was complete I logged into the stores admin area and everything looked OK and all the settings had been preserved and applied.

 

The site is hosted with Heart Internet who are listed on the Cube Cart site as a partner, I am a reseller, and it appeared their were no issues with the server environment and the upgrade was completed successfully.

 

Last week I got a call from my client who had discovered that the store had not applied VAT to any recent sales, fortunately August is usually quiet and they had only made a few low value sales, but when they recieved a larger order they noticed VAT had not been applied to the sales.

 

I immediately logged into the store admin and found that although the VAT settings had been preserved during the upgrade process the single rule in use for UK VAT was not applied to any sales after the upgrade process was completed, I have recitified the issue and reimbursed my client the value of the lost VAT, because the ultimately I am responsible for the upgrade.

 

If you are upgrading an existing store from version 4 to the latest version of the store script, I would strongly advise checking the VAT or TAX settings are OK and any rules you have created have definitely been applied.

 

Making sense of the VAT settings was hard work, the controls are badly labelled, there is zero information in either the knowledge base or the support Wiki and worse still the Help in the stores admin is miserable, launching the web page containing the help information in a light box is a poor design choice, the fact the page opens in a light box means that the actual page containing the GUI controls or settings that you want to learn about are now blacked out and no longer visible.

 

Then we come to the help information itself which is just a list of headings of the tabs and labels for controls and settings with a simple sentence devoid of any meaningful information about what the control or setting actually does or how to apply them etc, which is what you would expect, marking the "Help" link with the word "Unhelpful" would provide a more accurate description of the resource that the link leads to.

 

Cube Cart Version 4 was comprehensively documented which made it easy to find an answer to simple questions and learn how to apply settings and manage the store and customise it etc, but now with version 5 this is definitely not the case, even my client commented that if this were an open source script or software patchy documentation would be expected along with a steep learning curve and support provided by the community of users.

 

The usual expectation when upgrading a script or software to a newer version, is an improvement...

[bsmither]

"When I ran the test upgrade the script iterated through every version in order from version 4.3.7 through to 5.2.2 in chronological order."

 

Not so much chronological order, but rather a natural sorted order of all the filenames. What I am most curious about, but have no proof of, is there a difference in natsort() results between Windows and Linux environments? The CubeCart_history table (sorted by time) should show the order of processed upgrades

 

"[On the live server,] this time it skipped a few versions."

 

We would be really interested to know which of the files were skipped. Unfortunately, there is no confirmation, other than simply by not crashing, of a successful parsing and issuing SQL commands to the database and a successful PHP manipulation of existing data. What feedback did you get of failed or skipped scripts?

 

Would you please read this:

http://www.cubecartforums.org/index.php?showtopic=18170

and let us know if the same results are present upgrading from a CC4 store?

[petecube]

Hi bsmither,

 

I checked out the link to the thread you suggested, but the thread is about miscalculated orders which was not an issue in this case, the problem being that the TAX or VAT data/settings survived but the rule was not applied and enabled as it had been previously, so on the few sales that were made no TAX or VAT was added to those sales.

 

This meant that my client lost that money, because they have to pay the VAT whether or not they collected it, hence my reimbursing them the total loss for the sales where VAT was not applied, as soon as I applied and enabled the rule everything worked as expected.

 

With regards to natsort() you are probably right that there is a subtle difference between Windows and Linux, during the upgrade I was more worried about product images and options getting corrupted and having to manually rectify the issue.

 

I cannot remember which exact versions the upgrade script logic skipped, but they were a couple as it iterated through the version 4's, versions of the store script/software, I just thought that this may be simply because there were probably no changes to the database or structure of the store on those versions and there was nothing for the logic to manipulate so it just moved on.

 

As you say there is no confirmation of any errors other than the script not crashing, even if anything was displayed it would have been a waste of time, because it happened so quickly I would not have been able to read it or make sense of it anyway.

 

The important lesson here is to double check everything after an upgrade to just make sure everything is working as expected, but the lack of documentation is still an issue that needs resolving.