Question

Photo of Nelson Chan

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Check-in Label error: Birthday icon showing up under load

3

Hello guys. I'm looking into an issue where the birthday icon in check-in labels are printing out erroneously. It seems to be happening when the server is under high load.

Has anyone encountered this issue before?

  • Photo of Shawn Ross

    0

    Nelson, I did a cursory search of Issues and didn't see anything that sounds like your concern.

    1. Is this happening only to a particular printer, or to all?
    2. Can you define what erroneously means?

    Keep in mind that a client of some sort must generate the print job. As far as I'm aware this assumption I'm making is true for any and all Check In print jobs.

    I'd start by trying to figure out if swapping to a different printer causes the issue to go away. This almost sounds like something is messed up on the printer itself.

  • Photo of Ross Li

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    Hi Shawn,

    Thanks for the reply. I'm Ross and I'm on the same team as Nelson.

    Here is an example of the label printed at 9:20am Sunday morning:

    20210528_174332.jpg

    The label template is set to print the birthday icon when daystobirthday is < 7, but this child's daystobirthday is 97.

    We tried reprinting the label again on the same check-in station and the same printer at 9:45am:

    20210528_141335.jpg

    We get a brand new set of labels and pickup tag, and this time the birthday icon is not shown. 

    We have only noticed this happening this past few weeks and nothing really changed (or we just didn't notice before). 

    We also noticed that on our label we are using a daystobirthday field, but in Reports, we are only able to display a Days Until Birthday field for verification. In Lava, it seems like we can access both of these fields, and both have the correct value (with days to birthday shown in local Hong Kong timezone cutoff, and days until birthday seems to be showing server time).

    Any hints as to what could be the cause are appreciated as we give a little gift to those with the birthday icon and we don't want to cause any disappointments due to this error =)

    Many thanks!

  • Photo of Shawn Ross

    0

    Sorry it took a while to circle back around to this...

    If you think it happens under heavy server load, I would suggest examining your options for a beefier server to rule the server performance out as the issue. I know that is difficult to do if you're self-hosting, but wanted to mention it in case you're cloud hosting and could scale up your performance for a weekend to see what difference it makes. 

    Without more context into your configuration, it's hard to determine what the issue is. However, maybe if I share information from our Rock instance it will help you compare and discover what the problem is.

    My configuration

    Label Merge Fields

    Birthday Day of Week
    The day of the week of the child's birthday (e.g. Wed.).
    MergeField:

    {% if Person.DaysToBirthday <= 7 %}{{Person.BirthdayDayOfWeekShort}}{% endif %}

    Birthday Icon
    An upcoming birthday indicator
    MergeField:

    {% if Person.DaysToBirthday <= 7 %}B{% endif %}

    An Example Label

    Child Label

    Snippets from our child label that correspond to birthday; these are printed 'per person', and the merge field in the label is mapped to the merge code in the label configuration

    Birthday Day of Week

    Merge Code: BDW
    The label data below includes position data (x,y) and size data, so you'll want to customize 

    ^FT759,92^A0N,23,24^FH\^FDBDW^FS

    The ^FDBDW is the critical component, as it calls the merge field

    Birthday Icon

    Merge Code: B

    ^CWZ,E:ROC000.FNT^FT739,62^AZN,73,64
^FH\^FDB^FS

    The ^FDB is a critical component, as it calls the merge field
    The ^CWZ line is calling the custom font (icon) we use for printing the birthday present icon


    Hopefully these details help you figure out if you have a problem with your label merge fields and codes