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Duplicate entries intermittently being created
We have had this issue for some time, and have not yet found enough of a pattern to explain the cause. We use Formidable Pro for various order forms on a website. So the same customers will order different things on different days, and it is not possible to just limit them to 1 entry forever. For example, they fill out their contact info and the product description they are requesting to get an estimate for. When they submit the form, it sends the order entry into the Formidable database as normal and also populates another order app that we built to track them.
The strangest thing happens - we see an exact duplicate copy of the same order appear minutes, hours, or even days later in Formidable entries. At first, there were a couple that were so close together I just assumed the user was double clicking submit by mistake. But since then we receive many different repeat cases and the customers have no clue why they are being called for the estimate twice. Sometimes they submit the order request, get a phone call and then 3 days later a duplicate of that request comes through again and they are surprised and confused they receive another phone call. They obviously didn't go back to the website and submit the form again days later. The info in these entries is exactly the same, except it is creating a new entry ID and inserting that as a new entry row.
It only happens to a handful of people each week (among hundreds of other entries), but every week it does happen. It is intermittent and kind of random.
We have tried to setup error logs without any clues. I am not sure where else to look.
We have Formidable core pluginVersion 3.05 and Formidable ProVersion 3.04.02 installed and activated on the up to date WordPress 5.0.3.
Any ideas are greatly appreciated!
January 26, 2019 at 7:15 am
First, Formidable and Formidable Pro are not in sync. They should both have the same version number. If Formidable Pro isn't updating automatically, you'll need to download the correct version and update it manually.
While there's no way to pinpoint exactly what's causing the duplicate entries, I've seen something like this happen with aggressive caching. I would disable all caching and run the site without caching for a time to see if the problem continues. If so, make sure all of the pages that display your forms are excluded from the cache. Some servers cache database queries as well and run caches versions of queries to reduce the number of calls to the database.
It could also be a plugin conflict of some kind.
If none of your troubleshooting produces an answer, you may have to write some custom code to check if an entry exists first before allowing another to be added to the DB.
February 18, 2019 at 5:10 pm
Hello again. Thank you for the feedback.
I made sure the plugins were synced with the same up to date version. The problem persists. I am curious how caching could cause a form resubmit / duplication exactly, but I will pose that question to our server admin as well.
I would rather not add any custom code to check for duplicates, especially if this is a bug that should be fixed. This site is extremely busy and customers do often order several things, multiple requests from the same person. That would be tricky to determine with automation. The pattern is not consistent enough (with duplicates showing up hours apart from each other).
March 15, 2019 at 6:48 am
Were you ever able to find out what was causing this issue? I am currently having the same problem on one of my forms. The duplication seems to be randomly occurring on a single page form (the other form has multiple pages and no duplicate entries that I can find).
March 15, 2019 at 7:49 am
Hi David,
Unfortunately no. We still have this problem, and it varies in frequency. I think this past week there were 5 instances of a duplicate copy of an entry, but then 100's of other entries unaffected in between. It's super strange. I am working with my colleague in web development to troubleshoot and possibly even add some custom code to prevent it. I will certainly let you know if we ever solve it.
Discussion closed.