Participant charged but not registered for an event

[zutroyquixote]

My users today have reported a fairly serious issue today: they have found a few different cases where a person registering for an event online was charged and had payment processed (contribution record created) however no participant record was created (thus they were not registered, nor did they get a confirmation email).

I have gone through the CiviCRM logs, server logs and the database and there is no indication of what this issue was or that there was an error.  No record is found in the participant table or participant_table referencing the successfully process contribution record.

Nothing jumps out at me as far as the contact record (email is accurate and active, online registration for these events works fine under other circumstances).

Under what circumstances could this possibly happen?  This is pretty serious.  Surely there must be a check/validation to ensure that the participant record is created if payment is processed...

[petednz]

hi - we have been hitting a similar problem - I will see if we can get a summary of our investigation on here for you later today

[Eileen]

We have been having this problem on 3.3.6. I backported the createCMSUser function from 3.4 but I think the createcms user part should be moved after the participant creation - so if it fails for any reason the data isn't messed up. Wanna test this?


Index: CRM/Event/Form/Registration.php
===================================================================
--- CRM/Event/Form/Registration.php   (revision 33706)
+++ CRM/Event/Form/Registration.php   (working copy)
@@ -742,10 +742,7 @@
                  !CRM_Utils_Array::value( 'is_monetary', $this->_values['event'] ) ) {
                 $mail = 'email-Primary';
             }
-            require_once "CRM/Core/BAO/CMSUser.php";
-            if ( ! CRM_Core_BAO_CMSUser::create( $this->_params, $mail ) ) {
-                CRM_Core_Error::statusBounce( ts('Your profile is not saved and Account is not created.') );
-            }
+
         }
         //get the amount of primary participant
         if( CRM_Utils_Array::value('is_primary', $this->_params ) ) {
@@ -792,6 +789,10 @@
             $this->set ( 'primaryParticipant',  $this->_params );
         }
         $this->assign('action',$this->_action);
+        require_once "CRM/Core/BAO/CMSUser.php";
+        if ( ! CRM_Core_BAO_CMSUser::create( $this->_params, $mail ) ) {
+          CRM_Core_Error::statusBounce( ts('Your profile is not saved and Account is not created.') );
+        }
     }
 
     /**

[zutroyquixote]

Thanks Peter - looking forward to your findings.

Eileen - before I go to far with this a few questions:
- I am inferring then that you think the likely culprit is an issue when creating the CMS user?  What kind of issues could come up when the CMS user is created?  For the contacts that have been affected by this issue I can see that their CMS user is successfully created.  When you experience the problem do you see any errors logged, or is it as I described, simply no participant record is created.
- I am running 3.3.2 and will likely be moving to 3.4 in the coming weeks.  To your knowledge would the code issue you describe exist there? 
- Also, generally this issue isn't reproducible (I don't know the circumstances under which it is occurring so I can test beyond verifying expected functionality isn't broken). 

Ben

[Eileen]

The symptoms you describe (including reproducibility issues) are as we experienced. I am monitoring whether backporting the 3.4 cmuser function has stopped it - so far seems OK - it seems maybe something to do with the captcha module. On another Db we have a problem when the CMS User table under admin settings was incorrect.

The fix in the forum is only to prevent a problem with the cms user creation from also preventing event creation.

[petednz]

Thanks Peter - looking forward to your findings.

Eileen is the source of 'our findings' ;-)