Extra "Request Approved" e-mails sent nightly to missed reservations [v5.5]

[orenyk]

Reported by BMEC:

[Redacted] and I noticed that BMEC has been sending and receiving “Request Approved” notices for reservations that were made the day before the email was sent. For instance, the email I am forwarding below.

We received a huge batch of them Tuesday morning (with the batch emails that are sent out at 5am), and the bulk of them were for [Redacted] when she had her BMEC training session with the eq specs. After checking the other recipients of these emails, these notices are being generated for any reservations that were due to start the day before and were not picked up – all of the reservations are marked as Missed when you click on the reservation number.

Essentially, in addition to receiving a [Missed Reservation] notice, patrons are receiving a [Request Approved] email the same morning, which is confusing.

I’ve gone through the settings on BMEC and can’t find any way to turn these notices off. Is there some way to stop such emails?

I tested v5.5.2 on DEV / SDMP and "Request Approved" notifications are being sent appropriately at the time that requests are approved. I'm wondering if this has something to do with our "interpret which e-mail to send by status" magic that we implemented in #519. I'm leaving the request that I approved un-checked-out so that it will be missed tonight and we'll see if I receive a similar e-mail. Either way we should investigate further.

[orenyk]

Update, I asked:

Is this e-mail in addition to the missed Reservation e-mail or instead of it? The "Request Approved" e-mails are only supposed to send immediately upon request approval...

And they answered:

In addition. So we get both sets.

The main problems is that these are just regular reservations – not ones that need approval. And then they’re sent out the same day that the reservation was marked as missed. So when the patron receives the notice, it’s pointless.

Very strange. @esoterik, can you take a look at this as well since you're the most familiar with this code? It appears as though one of our rake tasks is inadvertently sending out "Request Approved" e-mails when it shouldn't. I'm also setting up a reservation for you on the DEV SDMP instance for today; see what e-mails you receive overnight. Thanks!

[orenyk]

One more update. I asked:

You're getting two e-mails per regular reservations every night (after their start date ends), one that says "Request Approved" and one that says "Reservation Missed"?

And they answered:

Yes. And we receive the Request Approved emails ONLY if the reservation was missed. So any reservation that was picked up doesn’t generate the email the next morning.

[orenyk]

Another e-mail:

Seconding all of this. I reserved a bunch of equipment for the 18th-19th for training. I didn't actually check this equipment out; I then received emails on the morning of the 19th that said "request approved." I got a second set of emails on the 20th that said the reservations had been missed.

This timing is bizarre, let's get it figured out!

[esoterik]

I suspect that this has something to do with when the reservation status is being updated by the email rake task

[esoterik]

also, I know we talked about this on Monday, but what branch should 5.5.3 issues be based off of again?

[esoterik]

Okay so the reason it's send request approved emails is that the only time emails are sent for a reservation with status reserved is for approved requests

[orenyk]

You should use origin/release-v5.5 for backported issues. Your suspicion sounds right, although I'm still confused about how it could be flagged as a request when it was created as as regular reservation. In any case, you'll figure it out 😛.

[esoterik]

It isn't flagged as a request; here's the relevant lines (40-42) in the mailer (which I'll fix by checking for the request flag, but aren't the exact source of the problem):

  if @status == 'reserved'
  # we only send emails for reserved reservations if it was a request
  @status = 'request approved'