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There is a DNP issue that I'd like to get some informed feedback on.

A developer has created for me a form that uses the API to create customer accounts under my reseller account. In the process it also creates customer e-mail accounts, as well as a website and an FTP account.

Now this works fine. But during the testing/troubleshooting phase I repeatedly used the form to create and delete dummy customer accounts, and I found that...

• Sometimes it is possible to create a new customer account, then delete it, then create it again straight away.
   
  
• On other occasions the account would be recreated OK (according to the audit log) and then immediately deleted -- rollback code being invoked because of an error.

As best we can figure out the "error" is that the domain associated with the dummy account is still "hanging around" in a server somewhere. Not a very technical description, but hopefully you know what I mean.

The most extreme case I came across was an inability to successfully recreate the same customer account at any time over a two-day period. Then it just suddenly came good!

 I was later told by the host that in the interim they had upgraded DNP from 2.8.10 to 2.8.12. However the upgrade doesn't seem to have been any sort of cause or remedy because I've had the same thing happen again since.

Can anyone throw any light on this behaviour?

During our testing process we too noted a delayed delete of an account but never gave it any real consideration since we didn't think it would cause any problems for us.  -- but nothing that took a couple days to process.

Yes, I agree that wouldn't normally pose a problem -- in a real-world situation you would rarely ever want to recreate an account immediately after deleting it, although it could happen in the case of a silly accident such as deleting the wrong account.

However, when testing, something like that can be very disconcerting if you're not aware that it can happen. In other cases I was able to repeatedly create and delete using identical account details, without any lag. Which only made that particular instance more puzzling.

 I wasted a lot of time trying to find a problem with code, account configuration, etc when there was no problem to be found -- at least, not one that I could do anything about.

 But two days -- even one day -- seems to me to be an extraordinarily long time to be locked out from a repeat attempt.

 I suppose this is a "feature" of IIS ????

HerbMan:

 But two days -- even one day -- seems to me to be an extraordinarily long time to be locked out from a repeat attempt.

Yes, that is a really long time.

HerbMan:

 I suppose this is a "feature" of IIS ????

Nice... you're starting to sound like a programmer that works at our office.  lol

I'm guessing that it has to do with the interaction between the modules and how they are loaded/triggered.  I haven't really spent any time checking out the details and probably won't get around to it but it is nice to know that others are noticing this.  Where I saw it the most was in DNP....  when you delete an account the account stays in the list until the account is completely deleted on the back end....  however it sounds like you might be experiencing something different where the account is deleted out of the list but not yet done deleting out of the file system/etc?

What I've noticed is that, when DNP returns from the account delete process, the customer list count hasn't been reduced by one. The number of customer accounts won't change until you come back to the Customers page after some other action.

However, looking at the list, the deleted customer account has disappeared, so the temporarily inaccurate count is only a minor bug.

The fact that I'm using a Reseller account may mean that my perspective is different to yours.

HerbMan:

What I've noticed is that, when DNP returns from the account delete process, the customer list count hasn't been reduced by one. The number of customer accounts won't change until you come back to the Customers page after some other action.

Yes, this is what I am seeing too.