Auto increment started skipping values 2022-09-20

We’ve experienced a few challenges with our Knack application since the upgrade in August but things seemed to be back to normal until this week when our auto increment started skipping. We have an auto increment field in our job table that we use to create unique IDs for each new job. Because we had existing numbers (there was life before Knack) a field was created to add 6794 to each auto increment number to create a new job ID.

This has worked for over 3 years but this week when we were entering jobs (we enter all jobs manually) the auto increment field value jumped from 3493 to 3523 and then from 3523 to 3556. This isn’t a show stopper but it creates gaps in our ID sequence and we use auto increment for some other functions that would be an issue. I tried a few more and sometime the increment is more than 20 other times it drops back to 1, there doesn’t seem to be any pattern.

I sent this off to Knack 9/20 (2 days ago) and have not heard anything. That along with the issues we saw in the recent upgrade are starting to raise some concerns with me.

Thanks,

Scott

Hi @Scott3 - I’ve just seen your post from September as I’ve experience the same issue today and just raised a ticket to support.

@Kat - has there been any feedback on this issue, I presume it has affected others.

This is my experience today, it’s my own personal invoicing application, I’m the only person with access and have not deleted the records:

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I have not heard anything from Knack on this, other than they were looking into it. The issue mysteriously started and then went away. It is very frustrating this cannot be explained, it’s almost like I’m treated like a child that can’t understand such complexities.

Additionally we had a situation with our change orders that used an increment function that stopped working a couple weeks ago. All new change orders came up with the string “Undefined” in their respective field. I contacted Knack and did not hear anything for 3 business days. I did some R&D working with the field and eventually got it to start incrementing again by moving its place in the object. Eventually I was contacted by Knack and was told the field order was not correct and that moving it fixed the problem. However the increment function worked fine for over 4 years until that point and then stopped.

There’s an existing bug for this auto-increment value skipping. We can link any chat or support ticket to it so you get updates as they come out, as it becomes fixed, enters testing, releases.

As regards that second issue Scott, I’m sorry you ran into it. Field order of operations has been a thing for a very long time and it’s likely that it just hadn’t run into a scenario where it ran out of order yet, causing the value not to be correct. There weren’t any major changes made to it that would’ve caused a shift in behavior there, so I can’t really account for why it appeared to have worked and then didn’t, but these are very likely two unrelated issues.

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The increment skipping issue occurred again. This time our job # increased by 33 and then resumed incrementing by 1. Our mgmt team is very concerned about Knack and this only adds fuel. Is there a defect # or something that this is being tracked by?

I have the same issue. As others, this has worked for 5 plus years and now skipped,

Also, I have pivot tables that have after and before date filters, all changed to the current date for both.

I know there’s no point is saying this, but this isn’t an upgrade, its anitemare!

Hey there! Glad to see there’s still conversation around the auto increment skipping bug going on. We understand that it’s frustrating, work is still going into fixing this, and there is a strategy surrounding alleviating as much of this as is possible quickly.

Phil,

We had another occurrence of this crop up today. The thing that worries me is we are using the increment function to generate unique identifiers for customers, jobs, and estimates. This has worked fine for years and now they are skipping. In the back of my mind, I worry about data integrity.

Reluctantly, I’m starting to look at other solutions.

Scott

Hi all, just wanted to let you know that we certainly appreciate the severity of this problem and understand how can it affect data, which is why this is one of the highest priorities of our engineering team right now.

As Bill had mentioned we do have a gameplan for addressing the underlying causes and fixing them - we’ve added some additional logging capabilities to let us capture occurrences of this with more precision just so that we have more data points on the issue as that could help our team resolve all the instances of this happening.

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Hi Marek
Appreciating that you’re doing the PR as you should, and I’m certain working hard to amend this. But lets just acknowledge this SHOUN’T have happened in the first instance. The system should’ve been hammered hard in testing before implementation.

Can you also address if there’s issues with reports specifically filters on dates. All my date filters (Before and Afters dates) were reset to the current date.

It’s impossible to mitigate in dialogue with our clients, they all expecting some discount on service!

As far as upgrades go, I can not decern any actually the builder is much slower.

I feel like its now a game of wait to find out whats broken next!

Hi everyone,
This is a high priority for us to solve, and we need some help. For users that have experienced this after November 18th, 4:30pm ET (which is when we enabled logging):
We need (preferably) exact dates, times, timezone of when this occurred, the slug/url, and the object name so we can look at the logging in more detail.
If you can provide this, please open up a support ticket (or use an existing one if it exists). Feel free to put attn: Kara in it. We have engineers ready to work on it right away.
@Kat @Kat fyi
Thank you - we appreciate your help in making Knack better :heart_decoration:
Kara

Kara,

This is the type of response we need. Our incident occurred November 18, 2022 around 7:00 AM eastern time.

The records are in the Estimates table. A URL for that table in the builder is below.

https://builder.knack.com/derockelectric/projects/records/objects/object_63?builder_table_sort=field_886|desc -

The estimate counter skipped from 1616 to 1647. I did some manual manipulation to keep the estimate numbers consecutive.

I appreciate circling back here, but we need a better process to log and manage these things. How can I log a ticket and then use that ticket # as reference when chasing things?

I’ll work with you to make things better, but I need to understand your process and also I will be expecting response times in hours, not days or weeks.

Thanks,

Scott

Hi Scott,

Thank you for your response and for the ticket - I’ve updated my post, as the additional logging mechanism was implemented Nov 18, 4:30pm ET, so info we need has to be after that (although that is not to imply we are not working internally on figuring it out in the meantime).

Regarding the second part of your message:
I would like to have a conversation with you, and can bring in some other folks internally to understand how we can support you - and all users better.

Knack is undergoing a few changes with the recent Resurgens investment, and one of them is to hire amazing people across all of our teams, so that there are faster resolutions, more transparency across the board, and more frequent updates from Product.
As the new hire in Product, I’m committed to working with Knack users to make their experiences excellent while planning out a future roadmap that’s innovative and solves for your use cases.
We’re starting to release a few small features at the moment, but the main focus right now is performance and reliability improvements.

I’ll write up a post this week with more details on our performance and reliability work.

Thanks Scott - here’s my calendar link.
Kara Peabody
Product

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Kara,

Thanks for the response. Your comment ‘the main focus right now is performance and reliability improvements’ is what most of the Knack community is looking for. We don’t need any new widgets when our applications are not performing in a consistent manner.

I’ve scheduled some time next week and look forward to our discussion.

Scott

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@KnackSupport

Having settled down from my anger (again) and wishing to write a positive post, which is HARD.

I have, or rather my clients have again suffered another occurrence of the random auto number glitch, with the knack backend deciding to add another 30 odd records that don’t exist.

This has been happening for other users for over 10 months now, AND is not good enough.

Additionally, I’m now 3 days on a support request and still not SEEN!

A business growth metric is based on customer support and satisfaction . On a 1 to 10, I give you 2 right now!

The CTO needs to stop thinking about features and focus on reliability and trust and measure customer satisfaction!

To harsh? Don’t think so. There are other options available where reliability is the primary KPI!

And this is from a long time Knack builder.

Heya Phil

Definitely not too harsh - we appreciate the honesty because its the only thing that is going to keep us accountable and growing into the Customer Support team that you need.

Just to note that our EU team has just gotten in for the week, so tickets received on Friday will be read today.
Please pop me your ticket number and we can have a look at what is going on.

Phil,

Is Knack adding 30 records or is the counter skipping 30 positions when a new record is added?

I hadn’t seen this behavior since late 2022, so I took a look through our tables this AM and found we had an occurrence of this on 4/20/2023 when the system skipped 30 spots and went from 4350 to 4381 when it should have gone from 4350 to 4351.

I was told that this was being monitored by Kara (her post is above) and I can provide exact time and url if someone at Knack is willing to dig into this.

My big concern with something like this is data integrity. If something like a counter gets thrown off, how can we have faith in the rest of the data that is being stored?

Scott

@Scott3 If you have exact data, that would be great, thank you.

@PhilWesley67576 could you send me some times, via email, that we could meet with some folks on the engineering side on our end?

We’ve also experienced this, with the auto-increment skipping 30 numbers.

Is there a workaround / fix?