Createform Sending Duplicate Emails

[eydeak]

Has anyone else ever had an issue with Createform sending out duplicate emails?

What we think is happening for us is that some sort of service the Director project runs through sort of dies and restarts, and we end up with duplicate emails. We don't get any errors in the CF logs, but we can go through the email server log and match up the email addresses and subjects with the PDF sent for processing and see where it seems to start the same PDF over again.

We originally had this happen back in spring of 2022 and opened a ticket with Bottomline. We did not make much progress, but we were planning to upgrade the servers from window 2016 to 2019. When we did that, the issue seemed to magically disappear. FYI, the issue was never reproducible in the test system. Then suddenly a month ago we had it happen a couple more times in production again.

We are getting ready to open a new ticket with Bottomline, but thought we'd check to see if anybody else using Createform with JDE had any similar experiences and suggestions on things to try to resolve it.

Thanks,
Ellen

 

[KSwaeby]

Yes I have had this problem. One cause is when a Cdirector project writes files to a remote server and that server is not available. If the "send email" nodes are before the nodes that write to the remote server then when the Cdirector project restarts the emails go out again, and again - I think it fails the job after 3 attempts.

There are several ways around the problem but a failure in the Cdirector project is the root cause of multiple emails going out.


Karen .

 

[eydeak]

Thanks Karen. One of the UBE's we are seeing the issue with does write copies of the PDF to a network folder as well as sending out the emails. This gives us some avenues to pursue.

The other UBE with the issue does not write to any network folders. We have opened a ticket with Bottomline. Hopefully they can help us figure that one out.

 

[KSwaeby]

Use RegEdit to increase you logging level to 4, then release a job that causes multiple emails. Decrease logging immediately after running that job so you don't have a ton of other stuff in your log file. I would use that .log file to follow processing to see at what point in the Cdirector project the send email process is getting repeated.

Other possibilities for multiple emails would be if for some odd reason the Send node that is sending emails has "copies" set. Either directly specifying a number of linked to the Sys.InputHeader("NumberOfCopies") metadata or some other logic expression.

 

[eydeak]

Increasing the logging isn't a viable option. This has happened on a few different UBE's which run in the middle of the night and it doesn't happen every time they run. If we take the exact same PDF and re-process it in the test system (where we can stop the emails from actually go out and sending more duplicates), it works just fine.

 

[KSwaeby]

Is there anything in the .log file for the printer that processes the jobs that duplicate emails are coming from?

 

[eydeak]

In some instances, we found "Failed to open 'createmailPDFJT" in the log, but there were other instances where we didn't find any error messages in the log.

And it seems like it might have gone away just as suddenly as it started. We haven't had a duplicate since 12/18 after getting them almost daily for 2 months.