CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Update - there was something broken about the combination of event and profile(s) - the event was actually a copy of the same event from last year. Final solution was to delete the two events, delete fields, field sets, profiles, and then redefine all the above. (I actually copied field by field from old events before deleting - lots of customization in online signups etc.) This took more than 12 hours to debug. There was a nagging thought in the back of my mind that I should have done this earlier, but I did portions of it several times, and only very late in the process did I delete and replace the event itself. Probably a lesson here, but I'm too tired to know exactly what it is. My experiments of adding and subtracting fields from profiles were all meaningless since there was an underlying flaw that was blowing the registration up. Thinking a particular field was the culprit was ultimately a wild goose chase...
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I have a fairly simple event registration form that is driving me nuts! This is for a golf event, and what I'd like to collect is:
four names in four text boxes (I don't want to create new users or contacts for these)
four choices for tees to play from (radio button list of four different sets of tees - championship, etc. etc.)
one notes box (5 or 6 lines) in which the registrant can specify how to pair up the people, who else to pair with if they are only registering one or two or three of the foursome, how to divvy up the charges if they choose etc.

In other words 4 small text boxes, 4 sets of radio buttons, and one notes box

After hours of spiraling down from a more sophisticated design for this, I'm at the point where I have scrapped most everything and am assembling new profiles from new custom fieldsets, etc.
When I put in one name box, one radio choice box, a second name box, and one notes box, it's swoosh fast and registration goes to completion. When I add one more simple name box, I get a 30 second wait and a 500 Server Error. Attached is what the desired profile looks like.

I've got 300 people planning to be able to apply for these tickets starting late tomorrow morning - have never had this issue before in scores of events like this. Has anyone run into something like this before where collecting 4 items of info is trivial and fast, and trying to collect 5 or 6 pieces of info sends processing off a cliff? My hosting provider tech folks confirm that the registrations that work (4 items of info) works quickly (their words) that the ones that fail go over their 60 second script timeout limit.

Guy - thanks for checking in. I think what we saw earlier is just about the same thing here. I can remove a price set, or I can remove some fields from a profile, and at some point it works in about 1000 ms. Adding even one simple small 255 char text field causes 500 Server Error with 63000MS timeout.

So I cleared those caches and rebuilt menus and nothing changed.

My current profile consists of fields from a field set used for participants, and I'm now reconstructing another version of field set suitable for participants "in two types of events" instead of all participants of all types.

OK, I might just be getting somewhere. I have made new field sets, new fields, new profiles, and new events and was just able successfully to collect the first 5 pieces of data. Let's see if we can get all 8!

Everything is working now - can collect arbitrary amounts of info now that the old events have been discarded and all the field sets, fields, and profiles have as well.

So a lesson here is:
When you need to fix an event registration that's blowing up, take the profile(s) and disable fields until you get it working. Then re-enable them until it breaks. If it goes from 1 second to 60 seconds upon adding a single box, then there's some data inconsistency. I don't know of a sophisticated way of debugging, but I'm very relieved that this is now going to work and is back to being good old stable CiviCRM! Thanks everyone for help!