Second annual reminder

[chriscant]

Hi.  We're on 4.2.17/19 (but looking to upgrade to 4.4 soon-ish)

We have rolling annual memberships and I have set up reminders eg a month before the membership end.  The reminders are not set to repeat, but I do want them to go out again each year (assuming they have renewed).

It looks like the first year's reminder is sent, but not in subsequent years.  Does that sound right?  Is this is a known problem?  Or should I have set it up differently?

It looks like ActionSchedule buildRecipientContacts only adds a membership into civicrm_action_log if there is not an existing record for that entity in there eg "reminder.id IS NULL".

Any help appreciated.

Ta Chris

[Eileen]

I'm not sure if it's a known problem in terms of being treated as a bug (you can look in JIRA). But I have wondered when looking at the code how that would work. We only have people using scheduled reminders in their first year (& mostly only as trials) at this stage so haven't hit it

[chriscant]

Thanks Eileen.  I searched for ActionSchedule in Jira and didn't find anything relevant.

I can see that civicrm_action_log is used to hold mailings that must be sent (if action_date_time null) and to stop repeat reminders being sent on the same day.  I'm wondering if any more than a day old say can be deleted???

However, from looking at the code, it seems that reminders are only ever sent out exactly on the day specified (eg a month before renewal due) so zapping civicrm_action_log would not let us catch up.

Hmmm - tricky.

Chris

[Eileen]

Note there is a related issue

https://issues.civicrm.org/jira/browse/CRM-15376
(fixed in 4.5.1 & will be fixed in the 4.4 LTS)

[chriscant]

I think a simple fix to get us going from now on would be to delete/disable the existing membership reminders and create them again.  That way they will get a new action_schedule_id.  It won't let us catch up though.
Chris

[chriscant]

I've reported this here:
https://issues.civicrm.org/jira/browse/CRM-15461
I haven't gone deeply into the code but I can't immediately see a quick solution that will cover all cases.

[chriscant]

The fix in https://issues.civicrm.org/jira/browse/CRM-15376 seems to work thanks.  We'll hopefully get our live system onto this before another year is up - so we won't lose any more renewals.

If you are reading this thread, make sure that you set up the reminders to repeat annually if you want them to go out on the second and subsequent years of membership.  (My opinion is that I would have expected reminders to go out annually without having to tick repeat.  I would only have expected to tick repeat if I wanted a second reminder say a couple of weeks after the first.)

For an annual membership I need to tick repeat, set every 1 year until 1 day after membership end.

Note: in one test, the repeat reminder went out a day later than expected because the cron on the expected day was a fraction earlier in the day than previously.

Chris