Second Appointment Reminder Not Sent
When we have two appointments for one client with two pets with adjacent appointment times (whether consultation or surgery), eg 10:15 and 10:30, the second appointment reminder SMS is not sent when the sender job runs.
The reminder bell on the second appointment turns green to suggest it's been sent, but when we look at Customer | Communications and Alerts only one SMS (the one for the first appointment) is shown as being sent.
This has resulted in clients ringing to confirm if they do in fact have two appointments.
Is there a workaround to ensure both appointment reminders are sent?
Re: Second Appointment Reminder Not Sent
So there is probably a different issue here.
I tried this out on our system - our SMS system uses EMAIL2SMS via clickatell..
I confirmed that the reminder system did indeed send 2 Email Requests - and eventually I did get a response
So it's either the SMS plugin you are using OR your SMS provider suppresses duplicates.
Re: Second Appointment Reminder Not Sent
We use EmailToSMS via Wholesalesms.
>I confirmed that the reminder system did indeed send 2 Email Requests
How did you confirm this?
>it's either the SMS plugin you are using
It's the default OV "Generic Email Gateway". Has worked faultlessly for years only ever manually, but I've only set up Job Queues and Job Senders over past three weeks and this is happening whenever there's two sequential appointments for the one client.
Same client, two pets, Salt and Pepper, both booked in for desexing on same day thus with sequential appointments. OpenVPMS changed both "reminder bells" to green, but only Salt (the first appointment) was sent a reminder, only Salt's SMS is in Customer | Alerts and Comms, only Salt is in Wholesalesms's Sent folder.
I did look at the Tomcat logs but they may as well be written in Swahili
and way above my pay grade.
>your SMS provider suppresses duplicates.
WholesaleSMS has confirmed that they send whatever is submitted and don't have any "functionality to delete any kind of SMS as we do have to keep it for certain timeframes" (their quote).
Re: Second Appointment Reminder Not Sent
I confirmed it by checking my SENT MAIL in the actual SMTP servers sent mail - I could see 2 emails sent to the SMS provider.
I used the Appointment Job to send these so same as you...
I do see 2 comms in the log as well
What mail provider do you use?
Re: Second Appointment Reminder Not Sent
The only difference i can see is we use the provided Clickatell SMTP gateway which is really just a generic Email2Sms gateway with a custom message structure.
Re: Second Appointment Reminder Not Sent
Have a look in Workflow - Messaging - SMS.
This holds the definitive list of SMS.
If you don't see the SMS here, contact me at tanderson at openvpms.org and we can diagnose further.
Re: Second Appointment Reminder Not Sent
Looking at your logs, this is related to how often the job is run.
You have 2 appointments:
Your Appointment Reminder Sender is running at 12 pm each day, sending reminders for appointments starting between 1 and 3 days in the future.
So on the 15/2, it ran at 12pm, sending reminders for appointments starting between 16/02/2022 12:00 PM and 18/02/2022 12:00 PM.
It therefore picked up Appointment A, but not Appointment B, which would have been picked up by the job on 16/2.
You can avoid this by running the Appointment Reminder Sender more frequently.
When you send an SMS reminder manually using the Remind button in Workflow - Scheduling, it will update the reminder icon on the appointment.
Re: Second Appointment Reminder Not Sent
As soon as I saw the first four lines of Tim's reply I thought "oh no, of course that's the cause, yet another simple PICNIC* error." Thanks for picking it up. I'll reorganise the sender to a "downtime" in appoinments so it's unlikely sequential appointments won't be separated by the sender job.
Thanks once again for your assistance.
Yuri.
(* Problem In Chair Not In Computer)
Re: Second Appointment Reminder Not Sent
Another consideration for you reminder systems should be how online bookings affect it. Given someone could make an appointment at 1am in the morning - for say 12pm the next day....do you want them to get a reminder to attend?
And the other thing is is 3 days to far out....my life - I am probably going to forget about the reminder if its 3 days before.
Just some thoughts to consider. Appointment reminders are really different from our other reminders.
Re: Second Appointment Reminder Not Sent
Thanks, Ben, good advice.
Re: Second Appointment Reminder Not Sent
Oh ... good point Tim @Yuri - our appointment reminder job is configured as
Re: Second Appointment Reminder Not Sent
Hi Ben
>So basically it runs between 8am and 5pm every 15minutes
Actually to 5.45pm if I'm reading the "cron trigger tutorial" correctly.
I'm using your suggestion with a couple of mods - inspired by staff with working partners AND kids<g!>
I'm using 26h, 3h, 6h - sending an appointment reminder for tomorrow between 5 and 7pm enables families to remember and work out who brings pet in and who feeds the kids at home (otherwise SMS isn't received till 8am on the day of the appointment. Our last appointment is generally 7:00pm and we don't have online booking.
and
*/15, 11-17 to send SMS between 11:00 and 17:45 - I know I don't appreciate a reminder SMS at 8:00am on a Sunday morning <g!>. Ideally I'd like to be able to configure two appointment reminder jobs, one for Mon-Fri, the other for Sat-Sun, but for now this does the job admirably.
Thanks for all your help.
Yuri.