Mysterious n/a appeared on most civicrm pages and dashboard does not work....

[newfoundcivicrm]

Hi All,

I now have a new problem. After two weeks of awesome performance and no issues I have noticed the appearance of "n/a" at least once on each civicrm page. Because of which the civicrm side of my drupal install is extremely slow (minutes to load a page). I have not changed anything from weeks ago after I figured out the css issues I was having with the javascript conflict. The civicrm dashboard does not want to load any longer as well. I used firebug to find the following output from

http://www.***.org/civicrm/ajax/dashboard?op=get_widgets_by_column

to be loading "[{"1":"0"}]n/a" without quotes. My gut feeling is that because this is being returned from the url above it is the reason why the dashboard is not loading.

Attached is an screen shot from my site of the offending "n/a" some of the civicrm pages will not load properly and some will not post back properly.

I found the following link about n/a appearing on drupal but I have not noticed it on my drupal pages....


http://www.yald.com/how-to-fix-drupal-na-error


Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Christopher

[newfoundcivicrm]

I have tried looking through the php code for the civicrm dashboard and I can't find any direct access to any javascript "n/a" in the code...... I have also tried looking for any uid mismatches like the link in the post above pointed to and there are none.

[Hershel]

Unless someone from the CiviCRM team will make a better suggestion, you may simply need to debug this the old-fashioned way--trace through the code, even using echo or print_r statements, until you find where that "n/a" is coming from.

Sorry I can't offer any better advice.

[newfoundcivicrm]

do you have any pointers where I would start. This seems to be coming through as javascript. Are there specific php files that handle parsing javascript?

Thanks

[newfoundcivicrm]

Here is another thing. I tried to add a membership and the member ship search returned n/a only. It found something just... Does anyone know where or how the member search results are generated? because that is where I want to start the debug search.

[Hershel]

I can't provide more specific advice but you may want to try the CiviCRM IRC channel--if you will find a developer there, it may be easier to assist you that way.

[newfoundcivicrm]

I tried and they declined to help.... 

[Kurund Jalmi]

May be you should consider hiring someone from: http://civicrm.org/professional

Kurund

[Donald Lobo]

just to clarify:

we did chat and tried to help. we've not seen the issue before. Expecting us to login into your machine and debug/fix the issue is more in the arena of hiring someone to do so

lobo

[newfoundcivicrm]

May be you should consider hiring someone from: http://civicrm.org/professional

Kurund

just to clarify:

we did chat and tried to help. we've not seen the issue before. Expecting us to login into your machine and debug/fix the issue is more in the arena of hiring someone to do so

lobo

yes yes you did both offer some help. But in the situation that I am in with this problem the only way to show you two the problem besides the screen shot that I already provided in the root post would be to create an account and have you both login otherwise there would have been no way to show you the problem. So yes you did offer some help (pointing me to links found using google that I have already read) and for that thank you. As I stated in IRC there is no money to pay anyone to fix things so if anyone out there has a habit of doing pro bono civicrm / drupal debug work please post a reply here. Any ways I did ultimately figure out the problem... I think.

So to recap here is what the issue was. On some portions of my civicrm+drupal install I was receiving extra text in the form of "n/a". Most of the time, but not all of the time, it was displaying on civicrm pages. The first time that I saw it was in connection with an advertisement (hosted via the drupal ads module) that did most of its click tracking via javascript. At the time I thought the problem was in connection to some field I missed filling out when I added the ad but to fix that issue (after I checked for empty fields) I just changed the display type from an iframe or javascript to raw. The issue disappeared on the ad and I moved on with my life. Soon after this I started to notice that parts of civicrm stopped working or included the "n/a" at least once on the page. Those pages also started to not post back right.

So I started to freak out a little because this entire project has been plagued with problems and with it being a no budget charity project it was just another problem I had no time or money to put towards fixing. Any ways back to the problem at hand. I waited until the last minute to install the ads module. I did so because in an earlier install when I installed it it completed screwed up my drupal install (something in the database got completely bungeled). So since the last thing I installed was the ads module I figured it was the problem child and I promptly uninstalled it. But that did not solve the problem. The entire time I felt like it was a javascript issue because I only saw it in connection with javascript output (the javascript from the ad and since civicrm has fallen into the javascript abyss on most civicrm pages there seemed to be a connection). That was until I tried reinstalling civicrm with a fresh database. There it was at the very end of the output of the post installation page for civicrm, right there, in an area that has really nothing to do with javascript and I about tore my hair out!

At this point I have already been searching through the source code trying to put echos and prints in the code trying to show me where in the hell the code is when php and the code are printing stuff out so I could figure out where the "n/a" was coming from but that got me nowhere quick (when I write code I put debugging features in, ie if $debug = 1 then print some extra relevant debugging info, but it takes up space, memory and processing time so I guess the devs opted out on something like that). I also started asking around in the IRC chat rooms; civicrm, drupal and drupal support as well as sending a pm or two to midloman (he may not like the public praise but...), a great user who had been more then help with another problem I had with civicrm (if I had money to pay him I would). Everyone that I asked (including the two posters above) said that they never saw the problem before and everyone pointed me to sites that talked about drupal node issues that display n/a when the user that created the node was deleted. I checked the database as per the articles and everything seemed a-ok. So again this got me no where.

LONG STORY SHORT, At this point I started to compose some lists and check out some more possible leads. It turned out that I had a module, one that the time line did not make sense as to be the problem causer, WSOD or White Screen of Death. Up until I installed the ads module (with the WSOD module already installed) everything seemed to be working perfectly fine. I simply turned it off and uninstalled it and the problem was solved. I think the problem might have been caused by something that the ads module did to the database that wsod didn't like but the more likely reason is in the way that this module touches objects in drupal and civicrm that end up being parsed through json_encode and json_decode (which both deal with arrays and javascript).

Morals of the story DO NOT INSTALL WSOD UNLESS YOU ARE ACTIVELY EXPERIENCING ONE. The installation of that module does nothing proactively like some claim it can and it interferes with too much of drupal and civicrm. Also fallow your gut; lots of people were telling me that more then likely had nothing to do with anything relating to javascript and I kept on that path and it ultimately helped me figure things out.

When it comes down to it it would be nice if a wiki page was added to civicrm that has a list of modules that do not work correctly with civicrm so that I can promptly add WSOD to the list. It would also be nice if there was a configuration option within civicrm to disable most if not all of its "handy" web 2.0 "seamless" javascript. Don't get me wrong it is nice to see and its nice to have when appropriate but not all over the place....

Thanks to all that helped!

[Donald Lobo]

When it comes down to it it would be nice if a wiki page was added to civicrm that has a list of modules that do not work correctly with civicrm so that I can promptly add WSOD to the list. It would also be nice if there was a configuration option within civicrm to disable most if not all of its "handy" web 2.0 "seamless" javascript. Don't get me wrong it is nice to see and its nice to have when appropriate but not all over the place....

thanx for the detailed analysis and report. much helpful. glad you found (and hopefully fixed the issue)

the wiki is community editable, feel free to create a wiki page to list the modules that do not work correctly with civicrm.

Regarding the second aspect of disabling javascript, i suspect that will not happen anytime in the near future

lobo

[newfoundcivicrm]

I understand that javascript can is a large part of civicrm but I personally think it weakens the power of civicrm and it limits what devices can display civicrm pages.  As for the wiki page I will as soon as I can.