Dealing with problems that might occur in RefTracker

When an error occurs in RefTracker a page displays that asks the user to provide details of what they were doing at the time. If the page is submitted by the user, details of the error are sent directly to the Altarama support team email address set in parameter 1.20. If you are an in-house installation, or want to be copied on all errors, add your appropriate email address/es to parameter 1.20 (semicolon separated with no space).

Because RefTracker is a totally web based application, it can usually carry on after a network or server error has occurred.

As RefTracker works, it writes an audit trail of everything it does, and that audit trail can be viewed using the History tab of the Summary screen. It performs the action first, then writes it to the audit trail, so you can be sure that anything in the audit trail has been successfully completed.

For example, if you were closing a question at the time of a failure, the system may have had to close the question, send the answer to the client, and place the question and answer in the knowledge database.

If the audit trail says that the status of the question was updated to “closed”, but has no information about the answer being sent to the client or it being saved to the KB, then to resurrect the situation you will need to:Use Answer to re-open the question for correspondence with the client, then close the question again with the same choices of “send the answer to the client” and “save it in the KB”.

If, for example, the audit trail says that status of the question was updated to “closed”, and the answer was sent to the client, but has no information about it being saved to the KB, then to resurrect the situation you will need to redo that particular action:
In this example, that would be to use Answer to re-open the question, then close the question again choosing “Do not send the answer to the client” and “Save it in the KB”.

However, if you have been presented with an error message by RefTracker, details of the error will display on your screen with an invitation to provide a description of what you were doing at the time, and a “Send email” button to send your description directly off to Altarama diagnosis. 

There are a number of error logs kept in the <reftrackerDomain>/app/log directory.  All application ASP.NET, IIS and 404 errors are logged in an error<date>.txt file and so clients should only ever see the RefTracker unexpected error messages that include alternative contact information and staff should only ever see the error details page that allows them to add comments about what they were doing when the error occurred, and, when this occurs, the error details for and your description of what you were doing are automatically sent to Altarama so that the error can be investigated and any rectification work started as early as possible. Information about issues with known causes (such as errors generated in relation to stopping hacker activity), are automatically recorded in the warn<date>.txt file.

For more information about errors in RefTracker, see Advice of an error in the client interface, and the following sections.