Hotfix for backlink objects

Last update: 4 August 2017

Summary

A hotfix is available for a possible data inconcistency of backlink objects in a special and rare situation.

One known appearance that may be caused by this issue are missing activities in the worklist of users.

Please read the detailed information that show up the constellation that leads to this problem.

Information

The issue only affected systems with

UDP and Multicast Protocol enabled, and
heavy concurrent load on objects with backlinks

Fabasoft was able to construct a situation in a labour environment that proved the possibility of backlink data inconsistency. In rare situations the following scenario could lead to such data inconsistencies of backlink objects:

The UDP and Multicast Protocol is enabled and working in the domain.
An object with it's Backlink object is cached in the object cache of a Kernel instance.
A user changes the object and implicitly the backlink object. By the change of the objects, the COO-Service sends an "object change" notifications to all Kernels in the infrastructure (UDP and Multicast protocol).
Because of a short network outage or network overload, another kernel instance could not receive the object change notification (because UDP is used, there is no guarantee that UDP packages reach the destination servers).
The Kernel instance recognises the UDP package loss (because of the missing package number) and sets all cached objects to "Dirty".
In this situation, the Kernel did not correctly set also the cached backlink object to "Dirty". Therefore, contunuing with inconsistent backlink data.
In the following, Kernel 1 continues with the correct backlink data, but Kernel 2 continues with dirty data.
If Kernel 2 persists additional changes to the object or backlink object, it will persist the dirty cached data to the database and overwrite the correct backlink data.
It also may appear that Kernel 2 displays the cached dirty data until the Kernel instance is restarted. In this situation, dirty data are displayed but not written to the database.

Solution

A hotfix (coomk.dll) is available for all supported versions of Fabasoft Folio / Fabasoft eGov-Suite and will be provided via our support team. Please contact Fabasoft Support (or respectively your TAM-contact) if you are interested in this hotfix.

Applies to

Fabasoft Folio 2007 until (including) Fabasoft Folio 2014
Fabasoft eGov-Suite 7.0 until (including) Fabasoft eGov-Suite 2014

Fix included in following releases

Fabasoft eGov-Suite 2013
Fabasoft Folio 2013 Update Rollup 2
Fabasoft Folio 2014 Update Rollup 2
Fabasoft Folio 2014 Summer Release
and all following releases.