Walking by the River - Sadhupul

We all gathered outside the office on the bright, sunny morning of April 15th, 2012. Slowly, everyone got together including one of the Beagle boys – Chatur! The little guy was more excited than all of us combined together! With the new highway complete, the drive was pretty smooth and comfortable. Of course a stop at the legendary Giani’s (the most popular eatery on the way to the hills) was a given, where we all ate some yummy aloo ka paranthas and chai, the staple Indian breakfast!

We finally reached our destination, the cars were parked at the Indira Holiday Home, an old building with, you guessed right, the ghostly charm that old buildings have! After freshening up, all of us started off to explore the area, and hiked alongside a river and enjoyed the view. Chatur also made a new friend, Sheru, the dog of the wild!

One of the highlights of the trip was Karan and Vicky’s obsession with the camera. They both clicked uncountable pictures…of themselves! Although Aastha tried to get caught on the lens as much but couldn’t outdo the duo. Another funny memory to take away from the trip was Sarthak getting scared by a teeny weeny snake and demanding that we go back immediately. After much encouragement from everyone, he agreed to go forward with one person ahead of him and another behind him to keep a watch for snakes!

After about an hour of exploring and when everyone got hungry, we walked back to the Sadhupul restaurant built on the Sadhupul river for food. Hungry and tired after the hike, the water under our feet felt relaxing and the food on the table nothing less than a royal feast! Sheru, still tagged along and enjoyed a meal with his city pal.

When all of us were fed and rested, it was time to go back. The journey homewards was just as exciting and fun as before. We all stopped for tea and refreshments at a place in Dharampur (a small town on the way) and savored the evening among some winks and guffaws! We reached back at about 8 pm, tired and spent, but extremely happy.

Goodbyes were said, ways were parted and promises to bring the pictures to the office next day were made as the day ended with smiles all around!

Sadhupul again? Anytime!

So moved we were by the brilliance of the Brew that we had to share it with the rest of the gang.

For the maniacs it was music for the palette but for others it was more like hammering the piano…”

On the face of it, the problem seemed to be too much time being taken by indexation. On further investigation, we found out that SOLR indexation looped twice through product catalog.

This instance of Magento EE has one website, two stores and each has its own storeview. It also uses uRapidFlow extension for importing products. uRapidFlow by default assigns imported products to all active stores views (if any store view is selected then this store view receives imported products).

During indexation (catalogsearch_fulltext) Magento pushes products associated with all the active storeviews in the system. Since we have two active storeviews, indexation took in 2 loops.

How to stop indexation from looping:

When importing products using uRapidFlow don’t forget to select specific store view to which the products are being assigned to. If you accidentally already have products assigned to multiple store views:

• remove unused stores / store views (as a result all relations to assigned products will be removed too)
• hardcode store_id in the script (preferably not the core file but overwrite with your ‘local’ copy) to restrict Magento to store views within that specific store (code / core / Mage / CatalogSearch / Model / Indexer / Fulltext.php : reindexAll() – pass store_id to rebuildIndex())

Have you experienced similar problems? What was your solution?

Software used:
MagentoEE-1.10.1.1
Solr-3.3.0

So that something better be seen to be believed.

Here’s a glimpse of CueBlocks and all the people and things that make it what it is!

The Team

Chatur & Carlos – Our Dogs
Their Story

Chatur & Carlos

When not in action

Beagle Brothers While Sleeping

Our Den– Officially (and rightly) known as the Entertainment Area

Entertainment Area

One of those Moments for the Camera

Just Posing for the Camera

Know the Writing on the Wall

So this is what CueBlocks also is, among many other special things.

Keep coming back for more!

More from our fun archive:
http://bit.ly/eJckLp

From Left to Right – Thesis(in the making) and Mandy

For about a span of 5 Days, co-workers passed by looking at Mandy as if he was painting the wall with ambiguous figures. From the first day, to the next day and the next the excitement kept building up, until their came a day, when we saw her, in full form.

And now, it is hard to pass by without a glance. In fact we know of some who come to hall under the garb of getting some coffee or playing pool, but what they really want to do is take a glance at her, in the hope that she may open her beautiful eyes and say those magical words-

Yep, the beauty of Thesis doesn’t lie in her voluptuous hair, or her eyes, or the way she seems to be gliding farther and farther away from you, but in her maker, her creator-

Thank you Mandy:)

Thesis (Greek θέσις Thesis) is a Primordial Goddess of Creation.

On the face of it, the problem seemed to be too much time being taken by indexation. On further investigation, we found out that SOLR indexation looped twice through product catalog.

This instance of Magento EE has one website, two stores and each has its own storeview. It also uses uRapidFlow extension for importing products. uRapidFlow by default assigns imported products to all active stores views (if any store view is selected then this store view receives imported products).

During indexation (catalogsearch_fulltext) Magento pushes products associated with all the active storeviews in the system. Since we have two active storeviews, indexation took in 2 loops.

How to stop indexation from looping:

When importing products using uRapidFlow don’t forget to select specific store view to which the products are being assigned to. If you accidentally already have products assigned to multiple store views:

• remove unused stores / store views (as a result all relations to assigned products will be removed too)
• hardcode store_id in the script (preferably not the core file but overwrite with your ‘local’ copy) to restrict Magento to store views within that specific store (code / core / Mage / CatalogSearch / Model / Indexer / Fulltext.php : reindexAll() – pass store_id to rebuildIndex())

Have you experienced similar problems? What was your solution?

Software used:
MagentoEE-1.10.1.1
Solr-3.3.0

CueBlocks has developed other magento extensions to further facilitate the online shopping experience which can be viewed at: http://www.cueblocks.com/magento-ecommerce-development.php

However, time had to play its part and Tushar had to move on but not without sharing his CueBlocks’ experience.

Here it goes:

Today is great day. I got up a little late in the morning, but it’s okay because I have up-till 10 to make it office. I’ve been looking forward to it, since I slept while reading last night. I’ve been looking forward to reaching office while people are still coming in, so that I can also participate in the morning chatter than goes around, when everybody’s sharing updates and saying their greetings, not because they have to, but because they want to.

I’m looking forward to it, because where I work, I am encouraged to do what I love to do, and share space with a set of people, who are not only creative, intelligent, good natured (although these are important things), but more importantly they are grounded, value-driven and a hell of a lot of fun to be with.

I want to reach office as soon as possible, have my set of meetings, answer my emails, do some serious data analysis (happens to be one of my interests), and then enjoy some lunch, before I get into the a very serious battle of FIFA 2012 on the Xbox.

I’m looking forward to that time after lunch, when I come back from the entertainment area and start the second half of the day.

And as I get up, I play this song on my phone which was playing last evening in the office. I look forward to that time the most. It’s when the day is almost over; people are wrapping up their work and enjoying some light music.

I am also looking forward to have some great conversations over the loads caffeine that I consume. Just yesterday, I enjoyed a conversation about people and what motivates them with a dear friend.

And finally I’m looking forward to it, because it’s going to be different than yesterday. It will perhaps be more challenging with the new projects that have come in and most fun part will be to figure a way around them with the help of my creative and committed teammates.

Yep. I simply cannot wait. I jump from the bed and start getting ready.
–
Every working day of the last few months, I have gotten up in the morning and felt like that.

And as a consequence, I now share genuine personal and professional relationships with many in the office, I’ve grown and learnt beyond anything I had ever imagined and I am as proud as one can be, of being a CueBie.

That, is my story. What’s yours?

We are using Solr in our latest Magento EE project. While running the periodic index updates using Magento’s native CLI indexer (shell/indexer.php) we realized that there was suddenly no data being sent to Solr. Routine test on Solr’s side didn’t reveal any issues; the server was up and running and Magento (Admin > System > Catalog > Catalog Search > Test connection) was showing successful connection.

Analyzing Magento’s and Solr’s logs didn’t provide any clues on what might be happening except it turned out that the indexing process hung right after the index cleanup. Since there was no recent change in the code or server settings the logical conclusion was the database. Tracing Magento code starting from shell/indexer.php took us all the way down to lib/Zend/Db/Statement/Pdo.php:

public function _execute(array $params = null)
{
    try {
        if ($params !== null) {
            return $this->_stmt->execute($params);
        } else {
            return $this->_stmt->execute();
        }
    } catch (PDOException $e) {
        #require_once 'Zend/Db/Statement/Exception.php';
        throw new Zend_Db_Statement_Exception($e->getMessage(), (int) $e->getCode(), $e);
    }
}

The problem emerged at line 5 where PDO::execute() method is called from $this->_stmt PDO object. As per PHP documentation this function returns true/false but in this case it just did nothing. It turned out that there was a deadlock on one of the tables that prevented execute() from retrieving data and passing it to Solr.

Have you faced a similar issue? What was your solution for that?

Software used:
MagentoEE-1.10.1.1
Solr-3.3.0