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Solving problems

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Written by: Administrator
Category: HikaShop
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No message is displayed

HikaShop uses the messaging system of Joomla to tell the customer what is wrong: a missing field in the checkout, a coupon that does not apply, a product that cannot be added to the cart. If nothing is displayed when something goes wrong, your template does not display the Joomla messages.

First look in the options of your template for a setting that hides them. If there is none, edit the index.php file of your template and check that it contains this tag, just before the one of the component: 

<jdoc:include type="message" />
<jdoc:include type="component" />

This tag is present in all the templates that follow the Joomla standards. When it is not, the template should be updated or changed.

 

The popups or the buttons do not work (JavaScript errors)

When a popup does not open, opens at the bottom of the page, or when a button does nothing (the add to cart button, a tab, the checkout), another script of your website is almost always breaking the scripts of the page. It is not a problem of HikaShop, but we can help you find the extension responsible:

  1. Open the page and the console of your browser (press F12, then the Console tab). An error written in red, with the name of a JavaScript file, tells you which script stops the others.
  2. Switch your website to the default template of Joomla for a minute. If the problem goes away, it comes from your template or from one of its settings.
  3. If not, unpublish the system plugins and the modules which add scripts to the page, one at a time, and reload the page each time. Sliders, scroll to top buttons, menus, cookie banners and extensions which load their own copy of jQuery or Bootstrap are the usual causes.
  4. Turn off every option that rewrites the scripts of your pages: the minification and the combination of the JavaScript files in your template, in a speed optimization extension, in Cloudflare or in a server module such as mod_pagespeed. They can break a script that works fine otherwise.
  5. Try another value of Popup mode in the Display tab of the HikaShop configuration: the popups of HikaShop then use another method to open.

Once you know which extension it is, contact its developer, or use another one.

 

Things stopped working after an update

After an update, or after you created a custom field, you may see products which do not save, an add to cart that does nothing or orders that are not created. It nearly always means the tables of the database could not be updated:

  • the MySQL user of your website does not have the ALTER privilege, which is needed to change the structure of a table, or
  • the MySQL server stopped the queries because of a limit set by your host.

Run the database check. In the HikaShop configuration (System > Configuration), click on the Check database button of the toolbar. HikaShop compares each of its tables with what it expects, adds the missing columns and repairs the content which can be (products without a category, orphan variants, users out of sync).

The Check database button of the configuration toolbar

The result of the check lists every table with OK, or an Error with the query which failed:

The result of the database check

If an error is displayed, it says what the database refused. Most of the time it is the missing ALTER privilege: ask your host to grant it to the database user of your website, then run the check again. If you cannot, send us the error.

To see the error of a page, turn on Error Reporting to Maximum in the Joomla Global Configuration (Server tab), and turn off Use AJAX when possible for add to cart buttons in the Checkout tab of the HikaShop configuration. Repeat what fails: a message with the failed query is displayed, like this one: 

Unknown column 'XXXXXX' in 'where clause' SQL=SELECT * FROM ...

That message means a column is missing, and the database check adds it. If the problem began when you created a custom field, delete this field and the error disappears. The ALTER privilege is also what lets HikaShop create the columns of your custom fields in the first place.

 

A blank page or a 500 error

A blank page, or a page which only says that an error occurred, does not tell what the problem is. Turn on Error Reporting to Maximum in the Joomla Global Configuration (Server tab) and load the page again: the error is displayed with the name of the file and the line. If it is not, the error is in the log of your server (your host can give it to you) or in the Joomla log folder.

Check also that your PHP version is one that your Joomla and your HikaShop support, which you see in System > System Information: an update of the PHP of your host can break an extension which was not updated.

 

SEF URLs on IIS

To activate the SEF URLs on an IIS server, use the rewrite rules of the web.config file that Joomla provides (web.config.txt at the root of the website, to rename). The popups and some of the AJAX elements of HikaShop call pages with the tmpl=component parameter: if a rewrite rule drops that parameter, they display the whole page instead of the popup. This post of our forum shows how to write the rules so that it is kept.

 

Asking for help

If you still cannot solve it, open a topic on our forum or contact us if you have a subscription. Give us:

  • the exact message of the error, or what you see instead of what you expect, and the address of the page,
  • the version of HikaShop and its edition, which are at the top of the Main tab of the configuration,
  • the versions of Joomla and PHP (System > System Information),
  • what you changed or installed just before it started, and what the browser console says (see above).