Open Dental Forum

we seem to be having some trouble with appt schedule since I started beta testing 5.3.3 this week in the office.

1)When we sched appts, sometimes two appts are created all of a sudden. and then when we try to change the length by dragging it just disappears.

not sure what is going on here...trying to pin down when exactly it happens

I would suspect the recall logic that you added a few versions back. Let me explain what I think happened. When you added it, you forgot to account for people leaving the varous boxes empty. So it worked for you, but was buggy for many other people. In an attempt to fix their bugs, I wrote some logic to handle situations where the various boxes were blank. I may have caused another bug in the process.

Here are some examples of behavior that might result from bugs in this section. User tries to schedule a recall appt. The appt gets created with a length of zero minutes on the pinboard. The user doesn't see it. Somehow (and this is where I'm foggy), the appointment might end up on the schedule, still with zero minutes. The dragging logic can't handle two appointments on top of each other, so when you start to drag, it grabs the wrong one or something.

I have a few other theories as well, and I have seen the behavior you refer to. I thought that I was causing it because while I was debugging, I would stop the program with the appt edit window open. Obviously, this leaves the new appointment in an inconsistent state. Did you try running the database maint tool which now deletes appointments with zero length? Are you using the new feature for different default notes for different providers? Maybe there's an issue with the time calculations in certain situations. When that starts to happen, I would suggest pulling a list of appointments from the database for that date, and seeing if any of them have zero length or the same time and op. Then work backwards to try to duplicate what happened. I have tried to duplicate it and cannot.

certainly could be in the recall logic as you suggest, however it happens when I just create a regular appt and not using the recall at all....but I suppose it could be left over from prev creations of recall appts you think?
I only noticed it this week when I went from 5.1 to 5.3...it worked fine for me before that in 5.1 with the boxes filled in...so yes, it must be a combination the recall stuff and the "fix" for empty recalls or something...

I will see if I can make it happen and backtrack like you suggest.

no, i haven't tried the new database maint for 0 length appts yet...will do that

Still trying to pin down the problem here...after I ran the utility for zero length appts, I went to make a note (appt status 7 I think) appt and it disappeared (zero length i guess). I tried again and it was fine until I dragged the length from the book. this it was gone again. I went to the database from MySQL, deleted those bad rows I just created and then tried again and it worked fine! I can't duplicate it again. I am thinking it might have something more to do with "Note Appointments" that i added a while back than the recall stuff or maybe in addition to this.

Anything that has changed in the last few version related to appointment status that you can think might be related to this?

Yes. Significant changes were made to the way time is calculated based on the individual provider rather than just the provider for the appointment. But it shouldn't let you save an appointment with zero length. I'm going to search through all sections where appointment.Pattern is set to see if the math was wrong someplace.

The bug has been found and we're working quickly on a fix.

great

seems to be working great now...good work on this fix.