Author Topic: Possible for events to become oversold with price set participant count (Read 375 times)

jcm55 · February 21, 2013, 01:11:14 pm

I'm not sure whether to think about this as a bug or a limitation, but if you have an event configured using a price set where one or more of the price fields has "Participant Count" set, it's possible for the event to become oversold.

Imagine there is an event with only 1 seat remaining. I.e. the aggregate price field qty multiplied by the price field participant count is only 1 less than max_participants. Users can still access the front end registration form for that event and create a registration that increases the participant count by more than 1 -- in some cases, a lot more than 1 depending on your specific price set configuration.

I know lobo's next post will be "please investigate and submit a patch"

Just wanted to point this out for others who might be using price sets with the price field participant count feature.

We work around this now by setting max_participants to something less than our true sold-out max.

Donald Lobo · February 21, 2013, 01:32:33 pm

while u r working out the patch for this jcm

, can i make another request

The one thing that Civi event does not do at all is "handle the race condition". i.e. if multiple people are trying to get the few last slots at the same time, i think once we go past the main page, they all get them and can increase the count to above max count. As civi gets used for larger events this becomes an issue. At the very least we should do a check and some locking before we send the person off to the payment processor

for problem 1, i did check the code and could not see where we even use the participant_count. I'll check with dave on this and how we handle it.

lobo

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Author Topic: Possible for events to become oversold with price set participant count (Read 375 times)

jcm55

Possible for events to become oversold with price set participant count

Donald Lobo

Re: Possible for events to become oversold with price set participant count