Troubleshooting Unsuccessfully Downloaded Lending Requests

Summary

In some cases, new Lending requests may fail to successfully download from OCLC/WorldShare to ILLiad during the scheduled Connection Manager process that runs every 10 minutes to check for new and modified OCLC requests. When this happens, the request will appear in the Pending or InProcess status in OCLC, but may not download to ILLiad until the next time the Connection Manager runs its scheduled resync process to update all active OCLC requests every 12 hours or, in certain cases, may not download at all. This article will provide troubleshooting information to help identify and resolve these issues.

Issue #1: "Pending" Requests Are Not Downloaded from OCLC to ILLiad

• Issue: New Lending requests appear in the Pending status in OCLC/WorldShare but are not retrieved and downloaded to ILLiad until the Connection Manager's resync process runs on its 12-hour schedule or do not download to ILLiad at all.
• Potential Cause #1: New Lending requests in the Pending status may not be successfully downloaded to ILLiad if an error occurs during the Connection Manager's process to retrieve and update new and modified OCLC requests every 10 minutes:
  • Since this process only checks for OCLC requests that have been modified within the past 12 minutes, if a request is not successfully downloaded within this first 10-minute cycle, then the next time the Connection Manager update process is run, those requests will be skipped as they will have been considered modified over 12 minutes ago.
  • As a result, those affected Lending requests will not be downloaded by the Connection Manager until the next time its nightly resync process initiates on its 12-hour schedule and retrieves all active Pending requests from OCLC.

• Resolution: You can force the Connection Manager to download these requests if necessary by restarting the Connection Manager service and forcing the resync process to initiate.

  This restart is only necessary in versions of the ILLiad Connection Manager prior to v9.2.4. As of ILLiad Connection Manager v9.2.4, the Connection Manager will retrieve and download all Lending requests in the Pending status every 10 minutes, regardless of the last time those requests were modified. 
• Potential Cause #2: If the Pending Lending request still does not download into ILLiad after a Connection Manager restart, or after updating the ILLiad Connection Manager to v9.2.4 this most likely means that there is an issue with the OCLC request that is triggering an error in WorldShare and causing the download of that request into ILLiad to fail: 
  • For example, if any of the citation information on the OCLC request contains a special character in the text that cannot be processed by WorldShare, this will cause an error within WorldShare when attempting to process the request that will then prevent the request from being downloaded into ILLiad.
• Resolution: These errors are not caused by ILLiad and must be resolved by modifying the OCLC request in WorldShare before the request can be downloaded into ILLiad:
  • For assistance identifying and fixing the request causing the error, please contact OCLC support.

Issue #2: "InProcess" Requests Are Not Downloaded from OCLC to ILLiad

• Issue: Lending requests are changed to the InProcess status in OCLC/WorldShare but are not successfully downloaded to ILLiad until the Connection Manager's resync process runs on its 12-hour schedule.
• Cause: If the OCLC status is changed from Pending to InProcess before the request can be successfully downloaded to ILLiad, those requests will only be downloaded the next time the Connection Manager's resync process runs on its 12-hour schedule. This issue could occur due to any of the following reasons:
  • A network issue occurred during the Connection Manager's scheduled 10-minute process to check for new/modified requests that caused the download to fail in ILLiad but successfully updated the status of the request in OCLC to InProcess.
  • A test server actively running the Connection Manager that is pointed to the production database or that has the production site's OCLC authentication credentials in the OCLCILLAuthorization and OCLCILLPassword customization keys in the ILLiad Customization Manager downloaded the request before the production server could process the request and changed the status of the OCLC request to InProcess.
  • The request was processed directly in WorldShare/OCLC before it was downloaded to ILLiad, causing the status to change to InProcess.
• Resolution:
  • You can force the Connection Manager to download these requests if necessary by restarting the Connection Manager service and forcing the resync process to initiate.
  • All test servers should be checked for active Connection Manager connections and these should be switched off by setting the ConnectionManagerActive customization key (located in the ILLiad Customization Manager under System | OCLC) to No so that these servers do not intercept requests when not in use.