RecChat: WebTrac Mass Registration Preparation - 02/17/2022
Table of Contents
Episode Summary
In this episode our Host Zach Malloch is joined by Learning Product Designer, Bret Alarcon and Implementation Manager, Brian Hatch to discuss the preparation steps that are recommended for your server to handle large WebTrac registration periods. The group walks through various settings in progress, server configuration, and RecTrac Profile changes that can be implemented prior to registration day to have a smaller resource impact on your server.
Recording
Transcript
Bret Alarcon 0:00
Hey, and welcome to this week's edition of wreck chat. I'm your host Bret Alarcon. So today's Zach is here, and he's going to be talking to you about your WebTrac registrations and getting them ready for spring. So what that means is, he's going to be talking about how you can get your database ready for some of those big spring registrations, and some suggestions on how you can prepare for them. So during the session, if you have any questions, you can ask them in the little q&a section, you'll see that little Button on the bottom. If you Click it, it'll pop up and you can ask your questions. And we'll have some answers. And actually, to help us with those questions. Today. We have Brian Hatch, who many of you probably have talked to, it's no stranger to the RecChat either. So he's gonna be helping us with questions. And if you have any comments, there's also that little chat Button down at the bottom that you can Click and leave a comment. So with that, I'm going to hand it over to you, Zach, how you doing today?
Zach Malloch 1:37
Not too bad, Bret, how's it going? It's gone. It's going a
Bret Alarcon 1:41
little warmer out there now, which is kind of nice, but I could do without the rain.
Zach Malloch 1:46
It's warmer and rainy today. And I think it's going to transition over to snow again at night. It's all sorts of exciting stuff. All right. Well, I mean, the whole reason that people are here are more about preparing for web registrations and talking about weather. So I guess we could switch our topic a conversation over to that. So this week was a little bit different. When I sent out the invitation, I included a link to this document your WebTrac 3.1 pre registration Performance Checklist. And one of the things I want to address first is one of the first things here it says note, skip this section if you're a fully hosted customer, or web hosted customer. So that is telling us that basically the hosted environment, the hosted team is going to take care of configuring a lot of these settings for you. But if you are hosted, we do ask you please get in touch with the hosted services send an email to hosted@vermontsystems.com. Brian, can you double check me? Is that accurate? Or Brett? Do you know if that's accurate? I think it is hosted@Vermontsystems.com. And we will actually I'm just going to make sure because I don't want you guys sending it to the wrong place. And checking right now hostedservices@Vermontsystems.com I apologize for that you guys are probably more familiar with that anyway, because you have to send them all your documents and images that you want to be displaying and all that sort of stuff. So just let them know the estimated date of your mass registration. If you have any idea about the Type of volume you're expecting, they can get that also. And they'll make sure that your environment is configured for that. If you're not hosted, then there's a couple of other thing, there's a few other things that we would recommend that you kind of take a look at and make sure you're going through, just so that you're relieving some of the strain on your server when you're having, you know, 5000 registrations per minute like some of our customers can have or even faster and more frequent than that. Everybody's trying to do searches at the same time, everybody's trying to process transactions at the same time get their receipts printed at the same time. And all that can lead to loading your server up pretty heavily. So what we'd like to talk about is kind of making sure that we're dealing with that to some degree. So let's go ahead and zoom this in so people can actually see what I'm pointing at. So this is kind of the first recommendation we have, we'd hate for you guys to get in the middle of processing your registration. And then your customers can't complete it. And you have a lot of people calling in, they're upset or bothered by it. And it's because of a bug that's already been fixed. So trying to be on the latest version of RecTrac 3.1. If you're hosted that's automatically going to be done. If you're not hosted just double check, you can always log into RecTrac You can check the support, little sidebar, and then it'll tell you what version you're running. So I've got 3.1 point 10 point 10 I believe we have point o one out and we'll have point o three out at some point but as long as you're kind of in the the major and major release version and the Build version. So 10 dot 10. In this case, I would be pretty comfortable going into registration myself in that case, but it's a good idea. So let's talk about the WebTrac hardware can figuration and where appropriate, I'll switch over. And now kind of give context to why we are asking these things or how to actually do these pieces. So WebTrac server on one server Transaction Server on the server in the database on one server, on one server and database on another server. So this is just a couple of different ways to do this. Basically, the question is, do you have two servers? Or do you have three servers, some people offload their transaction server, so it's an entirely different ones, you have three computers dealing with RecTrac, and all of its components, rather than just two. This is definitely the more common configuration, you have your webserver as separate, but then the transaction server and the database are on the same server. So if you go to one place to check your database backups, and if that's the same place you look to do any of your localhost 9094 stuff. And in here, we're just going to get into this management console. See if I can actually get to, there we go. So if you're seeing your transaction servers, which are these guys, your event and your VIC, these are app servers. So if we take a look at this guy, and we actually get in here, if we look at the configuration, this is deeper than you will most likely need to go. But actually, you don't need to go to configuration. It says my host is the name of my computer. So as long as that's your main server name, and that's the same as your database server, you're only using one server for both database and transaction. And that is once again, but by and large, the most common way to do that, Bret I thought we have a question already. Is it related to anything like this?
Bret Alarcon 6:39
See, it's just popped in, Christina is actually needs to go she needs the runner helping her front desk, but how to link more than one question to a section. So both answers are printed on the roster and how to write multiple session level rules
Zach Malloch 6:53
using both Yeah. So those are little outside of the scope of the discussion today, we'll, we'll maybe come back to this. We have some pretty good rapport virtual symposiums that might cover some of the handling questions to the so that they print on the roster. And we definitely have some pretty good resources about how to configure rules in the virtual symposium area, as well. But you can also if you need help with this just give a quick call into support because it is kind of a little bit of a separate topic. But if we do have time, at the end of this, we'll switch around and we can get into activity management. But I would kind of guess we won't. All right. Now this is, the least common way we have it set up is that this WebTrac server, the transaction server and the database are all on the same computer. That's actually the way that all real Vermont's system staff works just because we need our own instance of databases on our own laptops so that they're just for us. So in our case, we are doing everything with one computer, it's not a great idea for you guys to do that. So if you know that you are all on one computer, it might not be something you can really quickly change before you have big registrations coming up. But it would be something to look at for the future for better performance and security. Your CPU is allocated to the RecTrac and sends a transaction server. So with the modern tendency that people are using virtual servers, you have a little bit more flexibility about changing the configuration used to be if you wanted a better processor or you wanted more memory, you'd have to go out and buy them and physically put them into the machine. Nowadays, you can usually just go into a management console and kind of shift resources around from various things. So if you can give yourself more CPU allocation, if you can give yourself a little bit more RAM. So much the better. So then we're also talking about kind of disk configuration. So some suggestions about don't use RAID five, ideally, as a database drive. Theoretically, a lot of this stuff would be discussions that you had, when you initially set up your database, hopefully, it's not something that you're trying to scramble and reconfigure an entire server before you have to do something else. But kind of I recommend best recommendations are here. So if you are at a point of looking to upgrade or increase your server specs, this is a good document to kind of look through and just get an idea of what RecTrac likes. Now we're getting into the actual database configuration. So in this point, we're not really worried as much about how the server is configured or even where the server is, what it's called, or anything like that. It's about how to configure the database so that we're not telling it to do too much while we're trying to serve all of these people coming in in a very short period of time. So I'm going to jump over to RecTrac now and the WebTrac parameters are Profile. So I'm going to jump into Profile assignments. And these should by default be linked to your WebTrac user. If you see more than one web user here, you can always go to interface parameters. and you will most likely not have as many as I do. But we have our WebTrac interface here, and you can see what user is linked to it. So I know it's the www user that's going to affect my WebTrac environment. So that just confirms that if I go into this user, everything linked here is what will actually be affecting WebTrac. So here's our WebTrac parameters. If I Click Update, I'm gonna go back to our checklist. So it says on the core information tab, set the least web speed debugging level to error only. So we have some of our let's see where that is. I was so ready to go for where I know it exists in the static parameter profiles. But Bret, or Brian, if you know exactly where that is, here, I actually think that that is static parameters is this Oh, okay. So it says WebTrac parameters, but then it says go to static parameters. And I didn't catch that I should have trusted my instincts there static parameters. And this is where our logging level settings are. Once it loads. So we'll use this loading time as a as a reminder to read the document closely. There's our logging and debugging settings. And so here's our web specs, web speed debugging level. And so we want to set that to errors only. And then we're good with that. So now we can go to management, system management, WebTrac management, and then management Screen management. This assumes that you have a custom activity search Screen. If you don't have one, you can create one, assuming that you have some Screen design, we have some RecChats and some virtual symposiums about Screen design. I'm just going to go to WebTrac. It's going to be faster to get here management, Screen management.
And so I do have a custom AR web search. But if I wanted to just start from scratch. And if you don't have one, here you are starting from scratch, you're using our default Screen. So if I clicked Add, and just chose WebTrac, activities, search, notice there's going to be activity. And just make sure that using the Screen design that WebTrac is using, then I can basically just come in here, and it's in this group, I believe that's probably going to be actually in that document. So yeah, there's our results maximum. So go to group four, highlight your web search output table, Click the Advanced Field parameters. So that's where we are advanced Field parameters, and then the results Max, set at 200. And results per page to 20. So if you have much higher number than these, whenever somebody does a search, you get a lot more results. And so the more results that we're providing, we're providing that many results to every single customer. And of course, we multiply that by 1000. It's a lot of extra resourcing and processing that the database does. And also by setting the results per page to 20. So you're only showing 20 things and then they go to the next page, you're also returning those results faster to each customer. So they're not waiting for 300 things to load on one page, they can do it in smaller and more manageable chunks. So now we are going to go to the WebTrac parameters Profile. That's where I started. That's where I was assuming all of this was but I was wrong. So now, back to Profile assignments now WebTrac parameters, and it's asking us to go to Module cert set search settings in the rule search setting. So this is often one that see where it is module search settings. So we have these four different options. So none limited primary and all members. So the nice thing about having it set to primary or all members is that RecTrac are once you're logged into WebTrac. It will be aware of who's in your household, what ages people are in your household, what residency status people in your household are. And it will apply those as extra criteria to your search. And it won't display things that nobody in your household can register for. So it's really nice, it curates things really nicely, you're not going to see fitness classes that your kids can't take, you're not going to see resident only stuff if you're a non resident. But once again, it's doing more processing, it's doing a deeper level of rule check before it does every single search and you're possibly doing 1000s and 1000s of Search searches every minute. So dropping this down to none. And what this what the doc says is do it for every module that is in play in this registration. So you know if you have an Activity Registration coming up set activity to none. Sometimes you'll already have facility set to none because sometimes the way that time blocks work and your minimum reservation length. You just can't check rules for it. If anybody out there knows that they do that you understand what I'm saying if you don't know what I'm talking about You probably don't need to worry about it. But let's say you're doing activities and you're doing a membership drive, maybe I turn it off for both the activity side and the pass side. And then hit Save. And that's just going to make every single search go faster.
So now we have our check WebTrac splash page for reports. And are they set to email or streams. So this is something you can custom design links on your splash pages, if you know that you have a quick link to a report that, like let's say, your members login and they see a link that brings them to their childcare tax statement, something like that, you'd want to double check and make sure it's set to email. This will once again take less processing at the moment. It switches it from having them expect the report to display on WebTrac and pop up to getting an email later. And it will be dependent on your email queue. So the email queue, when you're using that it's not sending emails immediately. It's basically waiting until like, you know 30 minutes go by and then sending a batch of emails and then waiting another 30 minutes and then sending another batch of emails. So once again, it's preserving processing speed on the servers. Now we've got web speed configuration. Now if you are hosted, you don't really have access to this. But if we are on premise than we do, and this is the OpenEdge explorer, I was already in there. So that's localhost 9094, we want to look at web speed, then Click web live, and then Click Configuration and then edit, we're going to look at the agent tab. And we're going to look at the dynamic port ranges. So if I go back over here, jump back into my resources view so that I can get down to web live. So it's at the bottom under web speed. And just because I already forgot what I'm looking for web live, Click Configuration, and then edit. So here's configuration. And there's our Edit Button right at the top kind of didn't really look a lot like a Button. So we wanted to look at the agent tab. On the agent tab, initial number of servers to start in the minimum servers and maximum should all be set to 25. So we used to in this would be the way that you would commonly see it, it'll start up new servers as so these servers are not actual computer servers, their little services servers that are running, to handle the connections that our clients are going to be establishing when they go to our website and they're doing their registration process. So it takes not a long time to spin up another agent if you need it to handle the traffic. But it takes a lot less time if you tell it to start with those numbers and just keep 25 active and never let it drop below that. So you know this will kind of keep your server at a higher processing point just in general, when you're not doing bigger registrations, so it's okay to turn it off at those points to kind of conserve those resources. But during big registrations, it's worth it to have it ready and raring to go. Then we can verify the dynamic port ranges for clients live and web life. So we are in web live here already. And here's our dynamic port range 2750 and 2799. So that's accurate for we want web life to be. And then we can go and look at client live. So we'll save this, go back to resources. So client live is still under web speed. This is the WebTrac attachment. And this is the GUI. So RecTrac. When you log in as a user for your RecTrac database, you're actually connecting the other client live server. And then we're going to do basically the same thing, we're going to go to configuration, we're going to go to agent, we're going to Click, we don't have to hit edit, actually, we can see this, so 2700 to 2749. And this is actually suggesting that I changed that. So I have some old values. Oh, I'm sorry. That is right, because I was in client live, not web life 2700 2749. Those should be defaults. So you shouldn't have to worry too much about those other processes. So verify the maximum user values for the database in these OpenEdge explorers. This is a little bit more technical, you might need to talk to support or sales to see exactly how many licenses you have. But when we go to OpenEdge, we go to the resource tab, we're going to Click on the actual database and then go to configuration. So here are I slipped it so there's databases. Here's our live database. So I'm going to Click on that. And then I'm going to Click on Configuration right here. And then it is is going to be the area of default configuration
that that RT live configuration default configuration, just want to make sure that this is the right one because there were two. Server Group. Yeah, so it's this one. Alright. And this is the max users value. So there's our max users value, this is set to 100. Right here for me, you would want to double check that, but it has a little formula that you can verify with support or with with our, with sales is what I'm trying to think about and make sure that that's accurate. So then, if you have more than 600, simultaneous WebTrac, users contract for vermont systems to see if there any specific other things. So in this is not just like this is like concurrent connections 600 people trying to hit at the exact same time, I think, but now we've got our scheduled events. So we don't necessarily want things to run too much during this registration period. So now we're back into RecTrac. And I'm going to look at scheduled events. And so I have all these events, and I can see the last time it ran, and I can see the time that it set to run and I can also change the schedule. So if I hit Change event, I can see what the schedule is. And this would be maybe to see if I want it if I'm trying to run it more than once per day, or pardon me just take a sip here. So you might want to temporarily inactivate certain events, until after your big registration, or at least the heaviest part. And so if it's the first half hour that you're really getting slammed, you can come in here and inactivate many of your events that might run at the same time period, you're expecting to have the registration start, the biggest one is probably your database backup. And this can take a while this can also take a lot of resources on your server. So you don't want it to start a half hour backup process and take up all your resources when it's the first half hour, that's the most busy for you. So once again, if you hit Change event, you can inactivate any of these, but do make sure that you come back and reactivate them after your registration, because a lot of them are pretty important for the way that RecTrac runs. This is also very important. And for any of our hosted customers that had a little bit of performance hit on Monday, it was actually a virus scan that affected us. So you either disabled the scan or set it down to lower levels on the day that you're expecting a registration or the couple of hours that you're expecting the heavy registration period. Usually, the slight vulnerability for that brief period of time is worth it for the performance enhancement.
Now this part, we recommend probably the highest piece when we had a prep session for this, this is when the Brian kind of said was the most important. And that's testing it, testing it as though you were one of your own WebTrac patrons. So you want to go in and find your household or find a test household. Ideally, you'd have a resident household and the non resident household, or however you distinguish your big kind of groups of population, maybe senior versus youth, and log in as those users and take a look at what's offering and make sure you're seeing what you're supposed to be seeing. If you're waiting until the actual day of I would recommend using your Demo database. And there should be a Demo WebTrac also set up for that and turn on the stuff that you're going to have your next registration for a little bit early, log into the Demo and test everything now you won't be able to go all the way through and actually paying with a credit card against a real credit card account. But everything up to that point making the searches are returning results you're expecting. Making sure the sure things look the way that you're expecting them to is maybe the most important thing. Sure, it's unfortunate if things slow down, and people have to wait, but at least they can still see the things and they're just dealing with a slowdown. Whereas if you transpose the data for registration rule, and it means that people can't register until the week after they're supposed to be that's going to be universal frustration for everybody. So is it right for everything that you're supposed to see? Do you see the right fees for the right people? Can you actually go through the process of signing up for a class? Are there rules or something that are going to stop you can you make this would just be a credit card payment and WebTrac Just making sure that's working. It doesn't have to be for one of the big registration pieces. But you could set something up is just a real quick test, jump in as yourself online register for it with like a $1 fee. That's just making sure that credit cards are processing and then you can refund it from RecTrac. Can you view the receipt at the end of the transaction? Are you able to email receipt needs to do receive a confirmation of that, that's just making sure everything's working. Now we have this is a real quick one is WebTrac, debugging disabled. So in RecTrac, if I hit control, and then the function nine key. So now I have my debugging set to three. If I hit it again, it'll set it to zero. Now each time I it, these little windows kind of stick up, so I have to close them and close them. So it can't, I got a little confused about what state I was in, but just hit your function Ctrl f9. Once. So now debugging is turned on, I'm going to close that control. And I've got my function nine, and now it's set to zero, I'm going to leave it there because we don't want extra logging going on, we already did the other logging reduction in the static parameters Profile as one of the first things and then the session cleaner. So this is definitely a scheduled event that you want to be running it, I see the question there about what this is named. So I've got session cleaner is something different than the session history delete. So the session is actually the the active connection that somebody has to your database, they're currently doing something and interacting with what you have. The history is just tracking what they did while they were there. So you can run reports, you can run like your WebTrac Surf path report later, if you wanted to, to see what clicks people were doing. This just clears out that information after a while. This is the one the session is the actual session cleaner is what you want to be using. I see Mickey was asking about the document. So this document is linked in the invitation email that I sent out yesterday. So if you have that VSI Connect email with the RecTrac Invite, there's a document, Click here that brings you to this, this is also going to be posted right next to the recording in the RecChat chat archive. So in just a couple of hours, we will be that's not my support page, or as my support page, I lost my support page. Well, I'll just bring it back up. Support rec chat. So it's just going to be right under here under past editions. It'll be the February 17. We'll see the video for this. And then you'll see the checklists. So it'll be right here on this document. And I think on the invitation I sent out before, and actually, Mickey is saying that they she couldn't see it does it was anybody able to see that maybe you could just pop into chat and let me know, thumbs up or thumbs down if you weren't able to get it. But it was just a link in line, I think it was right above the line right before where it says ready to register, Click here's the line immediately preceding that. But like I said, it will definitely be here, after we're done with this session.
And then we get down here, I know the file size of the receipt documents if you use them. So if you're using receipt documents, I see Karen said that she saw it so that's good. So at least a couple people were able to see it, Mickey don't worry about it if you can't find it. So if you're doing receipt documents, this is something that you can set up in the management side of basically every pro or every option. So let's or every module. So we'll go to activity sections. I'll just double check this guy. And I believe it's on the sections miscellaneous section. Yeah, so receipt documents, if you're using receipt documents at all, then this is linking to something else, either a PDF or a Word document. And if these are large files, it can you know, because the server has to take them, copy them over to an email, send the email out, all of that sort of stuff is going to take a little bit of time. So double checking the size of your receipt documents, maybe even the more important one is the receipt logo. So to see the receipt logo, you would go to your profiles again actually still have that open up here. And it's in your receipt format Profile. And this is one that is near and dear to my heart because I have personally been affected by the receipt logo being too big. And the receipt logo. Now I'm saying it now. This is where it is right guys. It's not in daily processing.
You'll see up there it is under standard receipt options. So it is the receipt format Profile. It is standard receipt options. And you have your logo you can link right here. So you just want to find the physical file that is the logo and check the file size, the more the larger this file is once again now you're taking you're adding longer time to creation if every single receipt in your entire database, whether it's in person or on the web. And if it's even a half of a second, multiply that by 1000s, it can really take a toll. And the database is basically processing as it is creating that. So it can very quickly take up all the resources on your server. And if anybody happens to be on from a certain point in Illinois, where I helped you with your upgrade, it definitely took their server down a few times during that upgrade week, I did see a real quick question Amanda had about the session cleaner. So basically, either in RecTrac, so I'm processing here, I have my logout Button. Or if I'm on the web, I also have, if I'm signed in, I would have a sign out option. If however, I just leave and I don't come back to this, or if I close the tab without signing out. Well, that session that that connection to the database is maintained, and you're keeping it there. And you know, obviously, that's not great, because if you had something in your shopping cart, it's going to stay in your shopping cart until you're logged out of the system. So session CCleaner just comes out and it sees how long the session has been stagnant. And if it's been basically abandoned for more than X number of minutes. Actually, that's a good point, maybe we can jump in here. So this is in static parameters, where you can configure how long it lets sessions stay open, I realized we're at time, I want to real quickly just say just in case anybody has to leave. Thank you so much for paying attention, we're going to keep going and answering a few questions, I'm going to finish up the presentation here. If you need to leave totally fine, we're going to post that recording. After this, we're going to once again have that link to the document. So you have access to that. Thank you very much for attending. And we'll get we'll just continue on. So session cleaner settings are right here. So this is how many minutes you can get a warning for if you haven't done anything in RecTrac. Like if I just don't touch this for 15 minutes, it'll let me know that I'm about to have my session cleared out. For us, we're much more concerned about the WebTrac session cleaner. So those are all right here. So how long can somebody have things in their cart? Before they're going to get the message saying that they need to their session is going to get closed automatically. And it's usually shorter if it's in the cart, than if it's not. So like this would be guests, I'm just looking at it, or I don't have things in my cart, I can keep my session for 45 minutes. But as soon as I put something in the cart, now I've got a 10 minute timer to complete that checkout. Now maybe you want this a little bit higher than this, if you have a lot of people doing a lot of stuff and trying to like do a lot of searches and Build a really long list and maybe call their partner at work and get some opinions and some suggestions. But once again, if somebody puts stuff in their cart, and they just leave it, that item is going to be reserved for them until their cleaner closes. So you know, we could be keeping people from registering for stuff accidentally, because somebody thought they're going to register, then just left it. And if it's hanging out there for 60 minutes, then maybe the registration is completely done by the time it kind of finally clears out and the people who are really looking for it never got it. So that is what the session cleaner does. And that's how you can set the session cleaner. We're talking about it's
Bret Alarcon 33:25
Sorry, could you also show us how to add the session cleaner to schedule events?
Zach Malloch 33:30
Yeah, definitely have to
Bret Alarcon 33:31
after you set the settings.
Zach Malloch 33:34
Yeah, so that's in scheduled events. And this is one of the miscellaneous events. So like, if we just Type in session cleaner, we can see our management. But this isn't the automated process. So I'm going to add a miscellaneous event. And as far as which program it is I'm looking for, well, this is where I'm going to scroll down and find my session cleaner. So all I have to do is say this is my session cleaner, or whatever you want to call it, it's active, it will automatically you know, there's no scheduling settings here, like we do for most of our events. That's because it always runs every time the event is checked. So that is every 55 seconds. And then I'll just say run it as me, you want it to be a database administrator, it doesn't have to be as easy but somebody that's going to be a consistent person, certainly no problem for linking it as the ZZ user. So every 55 seconds, it's going to check and see if there are any sessions that are more than in my case, 10 minutes old, if there's something in the cart, or 45 minutes old if there's nothing in the cart, and it's then going to close those and log them out for me. So it's a it's a database maintenance Type of thing that's very, very important to us. The other thing that you'd start to notice if like your event, isn't your event cleaner isn't running is you might not be able to register people for things like if they're on the web and they're putting things in their cart. they get confused or stuck. So then they decided to come in if they left their browser open, or if they didn't manually log out, they still have those things in their cart. And when you go to global sales, you're not going to be able to put them into their cart again, because they're already there. So there's ways you can manually log out of their sessions. But the session cleaner is kind of the most important one. The question though, I have that same name. So it will let me save another. So I'm just going to hit cancel on that. Last thing to talk about the receipt logos. So I can't stress this enough, especially if you've done a new receipt, or if you just noticed that processing has been slow and you are using receipt logos. Just double check those sizes, we really want them very small. So earlier, we were saying I'm sorry, the the more recent versions, were okay with like going up to 30 kilobytes the way we kind of tweaked our Adobe program or the the act, the PDF, being part of our program in the background allows for that a little bit more efficiently. Certainly no problem with going as small as you can in any version of RecTrac that you're in, as long as it looks okay, on your receipts. That's that's fine, we but we want it as small as possible on the file size to still look OK, on your receipts. And I definitely think that if I had to choose if I was running apart department, whether the logo is slightly pixely. But it means that processes are running quickly and consistently. That's a very worthwhile trade off as far as my opinion, as far as my estimation goes. And that's the end of this document. There are a couple of other real quick tips that I want to share. But I see we have a question out there.
Bret Alarcon 36:38
YEAH. Jimmy wants to know, is there a global way to see what's pending? And as you?
Zach Malloch 36:44
Can other people hear me? Sounds my audio changes. So let me just take care of that just in case that's the issue. All right. Can you say something to them again, Bret? Now I can hear
Bret Alarcon 36:55
alright. All right. Jamie wants to know, is there a way on the global level to see what items are pending in the shopping cart without running PDF reports? Like something on Screen at a glance that would show which household has the item, the item etc?
Zach Malloch 37:13
I don't think so, my mind initially went towards dashboards. So dashboards are basically a way you can automate certain reports to run. And you can certainly do basically any of your transaction reports. Let's just do. Let's do. Let's just go to report output management. Right, and we'll just go to our system financial reports. Yeah, so Brian mentions that in global sales, there is the in Process tab. So I guess I interpreted that you're maybe wanting to see all households and everything in carts at any particular time. If you're talking about the household, specifically, that might have something in the cart, then Brian very accurately mentions that we have this in Process tab. So in process is usually going to be the last one, especially if it's just default. And this will show anything that is in the carts. So let's just go to inventory, I'll just add something in the cart here for this person. Go to in process. Now maybe it's Yeah, so now it shows that there is something in process for this household. Now, obviously, it's showing us something we know here. But let's pretend that this was on a different computer. And I'm going into global sales. And I actually went the open application in new tab. So pretend I'm just going into a completely different workstation for this global sales going to the same household. And I'm trying to do something with that transaction. Now, in this case, I won't see anything in my shopping cart, it'll be completely blank when we come in here. But if I go to the in Process tab, it will show me that there is something in one of the sessions that is still affecting this customer. And it actually gives me that session ID number right there. So if I needed to I could go to session management, I could look it up from there and find out who it is or what workstation is or etc. Now if you don't have this in Process tab, you have to turn that on the your daily processing Profile. So let's just jump over that again, real quick. I'll just choose any daily processing, you know, obviously you want to choose the one that is linked to you or anybody that is that you want to have that tab and so normally we use this kind of modules you have access to to make sure that people that shouldn't do Facility Reservation is don't have access to Facility Reservation modules and additional components. But this is also where the in Process tab comes on. You don't have to own any other part of the system for the in process. Have it's not like contracts, it's not like activities or facilities where there are modules, you can just turn it on, and then people have access to it. But very good idea.
Bret Alarcon 40:10
Jamie also said that they know the in Process tab. But just wondering if there was like a more global thing. Without reports without I can't really think of,
Zach Malloch 40:21
yeah, without running reports, once again, it. I mean, you could do a dashboard, but the dashboard is just running a report anyway, it's just kind of doing it automatically and on a schedule. But if you're particularly for like a heavy registration period, I might not want that big, potentially big report to run every five minutes or however frequently would have to be for it to be useful. Though, that makes me really curious, this is just a test, I have no idea if this is a feature or not. But we have this capability. If I go to household look up if I skip the household. If I go to the waitlist tab, and I don't have a household selected, it'll show me all Waitlists in the entire database. I don't think it does the same thing for in process. But yeah, so that's not a particular household. This is for the and they do have it. Yeah, so it doesn't do that. That was something I just wanted to try. Unfortunately, no, Jamie, sorry about that. Okay, last couple of things that I wanted to mention. And this is maybe I would just put it secondary to this is kind of my my points that I wanted to make sure that we're talking about. And we did all of it except for testing your forgotten password links. So if you have an account that's linked to your email address, or an email address you have access to, I would really recommend that you try to log into WebTrac, you say that you forgot your password and make sure that the whole password reset process works, because you don't want you know, a lot of times our patrons, they're only registering once or twice or maybe maximum like four times per year. And they might not remember what password they used for your account or your database or even which email address they used. So making sure that they have the capability of getting their own password resets sent to them, making sure that that's all working with your email, make sure it says what you want it to say, is a really good idea. And I can even highly recommend that you might send out a global RecConnect. Or maybe it's a RecConnect. For everybody that has processed transactions with you in the past two years, just want to let everybody know, our spring registrations are about to start on X date. To ensure a smooth process, please make sure you hit our WebTrac link and login to verify that you can do that or take the opportunity of resetting your Username and password now so that you're not doing it the day of and, and losing out on your spots. So that's, that's maybe the one of the main things that I would talk or I would have said, in addition to what's on that document. So yeah, that's what I recommend. That's what Cullen and Brett and Brian and many of us have kind of come come up with and talked through and landed on. So hopefully that helps out. Hopefully, it makes you feel a little bit more confident leading into some of your big registrations. If you do have a big registration, and you know when that's going to be, it's not the worst idea to give a quick call to support have like a week or two before it happens. And just like have that conversation with us. If you don't feel comfortable going through all of this yourself. We'd rather you know about all of this before the rubber hits the road as it were. So I will open it up. And Brian mentioned his microphone isn't working. So unfortunately, we're not going to hear his dulcet voice. But maybe you can Type anything if you want me to say anything, Brian, Brett, anything that I have missed any final thoughts that you wanted to share,
Bret Alarcon 44:01
the only can think you can really think of is when you're checking on some of the login levels and static parameters. There's a couple other toggles that you might want to check for logging as well but usually aren't on. But you might want to check just to make sure they're not on and I think it's like blast one or two toggles in there.
Zach Malloch 44:21
Yeah, and actually, for that that's a really good point to jump off where we only changed this one specifically. But I mean, if you if you turn down the logging for the other areas, it's all going to do like slightly better work anyway. Or slightly less processing in regardless of whether it's specific to web speed or not. You don't get a ton of VIC logging anyway. But once again, it's that piece and then what Bret was talking about, it's like we can turn off some of these things.
Bret Alarcon 44:51
I think it's web speed, real time debugging login. I think that's a big, big impact. Yeah, I mean You only really want that on when doing like, real troubleshooting. So that shouldn't be on. Like,
Zach Malloch 45:05
if anybody had to turn it on, most likely you turn it on while you were talking to support and hopefully turned it off. resolved.
Bret Alarcon 45:11
Exactly, yeah. So that's a big one that check.
Zach Malloch 45:15
In Brian is mentioning that may be completely outside of RecTrac. And maybe it's a little bit too late now, if you've already published things, but if you know that you have really big registrations, and you know that, let's say gymnastics, and swim lessons are the two things that everybody is fighting for, for the first 15 minutes, maybe try splitting those two different days, maybe Monday is your gymnastics registration. And Wednesday is your your swim lesson registration. Staggering it a little bit like that will give people will, you know, kind of hopefully, offset your server loads and spread it over multiple days, which, you know, slowing down the registrations is really the absolute 100% ideal way to make sure your server doesn't get stuck with any processing. But obviously, we want our customers to be able to find what they want and do that very quickly. So yeah, adjusting how the registration actually works, as well as your own policies and procedures in what days which ones occur on could be a really good thing to think about for later seasons or next year. Or if you have the option to do it for this year. That'd be great. I see another question yes?
Bret Alarcon 46:25
Is there a way for an individual to set up a WebTrac account? Who hasn't used WebTrac? Yet? If they already have a household with us? Can they? Or can a duplicate account merge into an existing household?
Zach Malloch 46:39
Yeah, so that's actually a really good point. And we can talk about WebTrac parameters. And so it's basically if somebody you know, the idea, of course, if anybody has an account, we definitely want to do password resets, rather than having them try to create another account. But see, where is it new, slash forgotten. And so new household option. So this is once again, your WebTrac parameter Profile, it's under your news slash forgotten settings, group. And we have our new household option. So this is whether or not you're allowed to create new households, you can just say you're not allowed to during registration is a terrible time to create a new household. So maybe you don't let people do that. And then maybe you turn it back onto one of these other options afterwards, live means that they can create a household and, you know, there are usually duplicate checks for at least the address, or phone number, email address, depending on how you have your own static parameters and household profiles configured. And if it does find a duplicate, it won't let somebody create that duplicate. However, if I said you couldn't create a duplicate household with exactly these things, same things, and it was your child's eternal happiness on the line versus calling me and getting my password reset, I would probably just try to mess with the system, get around those duplicate checks in any way I needed to to get my kid registered for it. So live kind of opens you up to that with potentially getting bad data and having people creating new accounts rather than just resetting their passwords. Batch lets people create a new account, but it's in this batch status until somebody in your database manually goes through and switches it to an active household status. So this allows you to get a little bit of review. Now. For mass registration situations, it is not going to be an instant solution, you will have to like submit your information, and then wait for somebody on your side to monitor that, turn it on. And then they'll be able to log in and register. But by the time that happens, it could be after your your main heavy Window and they might have missed the thing that they're already looking for. If somebody does go in, like if you do want to say we just want to make make it as accessible as possible, if you don't have a household create one in any way you can do your registrations, and we'll deal with it later. We definitely can do duplicate household merge. So we have if we Type in household, we have transfer slash merge as this program. So we also have a report. So duplicate household listing. It's actually it is a program and a report. It's one of the few things that really does that. So running it for households or for members. And then you're wanting to check based on email, or address or phone. So it's going to run through that it will give you a report and you'll get a list of all of the households that based on these criteria. RecTrac Things are duplicates, and then you basically work on that list. You'd see like, well, when was the old household created? When was the new household created? You could potentially run some transaction history on both of those to see which one is more active or less active. And then you come into your household transfer merge. And we actually have Some RecChats and virtual symposiums about this, but basically you take the household you, you went to, you're going to end up with one household. So whichever one you want to get rid of is your from household, whichever one you want to end up with is your two household. And then you can kind of match up your members and everything and process through that. I think it was Carrie, who was with us for that particular RecTrac going through those processes. And Anita has a really good point about a process here. So what she does or what they do at their organization, is they allow life, how live household creation. But when you create a household on the web, it's always defaulting to non resident and then they have to come in and prove their residency if they want that reduced residency rate. And that prevents people from that or maybe non residents from trying to game the system and create a household that is a resident household you know, a couple other things that you could potentially run into if you have live household creation as people can create their kids and give them any birthday, they want to to kind of try to get away around age rules. So you know, as much as we tried to make the system enforce your rules, people are very active is trying to get around them. So if they can configure their live databases any any way they are, they're live, if they can create households live on the fly anyway they want to that reduces and limits that control that you have pretty significantly. But that is a good option that you need to have to remove the financial incentive from trying to game the system like that good information.
Well, I think those are some really excellent final thoughts and that thanks, everybody for sticking around for the extra 20 minutes or so here. I think it was very worthwhile. We're gonna go ahead and stop this so we can get the recording out there for you and make it so you can easily access that checklist. Thank you, Brett for your attention and assistance and hosting and Brian, thanks for being a silent person helping with all the question answers and with the preparation. Thanks, everybody for participating and we will see you in two weeks time.
Bret Alarcon 52:09
Thanks, everyone.