Tech Forum

I'm unsure if this is even the correct forum for this, but I wanted to throw it out there that we are seeing problems with the mobile app attendance tracker overriding/altering anything we put into the Web version of sacrament counts. Is anyone else experiencing this? There doesn't appear to be any concurrency between the different platforms.

• Enter and Save attendance count via Web interface
• Open Member Tools app
• Sync (sometimes fails, sometimes works, but can't determine that w/o checking the sync screen)
• Enter different sacrament counts in the mobile app
• Sync
• Previously entered Web counts are overwritten with whatever is in the mobile app (regardless of update date/time)

This is a challenge when maintaining online and in-person attendance where they are getting entered in at different times and sometimes by different people.

We're resorting to our old mechanism of tracking via Google Sheets for now until we can figure out how to resolve this.

TIA

It sounds to me like there are too many cooks in the kitchen trying to do the same thing at once with different tools. Since you mention sacrament meeting attendance there should be but one person/calling recording attendance. For our ward that is the assistant ward clerk - membership as delegated to him by the ward clerk. And in his absence it is the ward clerk. (General Handbook, 33.4.2). This is under the direction of the bishop. No one else does this unless asked to do so by the bishop. The clerk does the in-person attendance counting and data entry directly into either the LCR attendance report or the Member Tools report. The ward technology specialist, or person tasked to run the streaming event, enters the streaming viewer participation data into a Google Docs spreadsheet. The data from that spreadsheet is later added to the in-person count. With only one person entering the data into the final report there is no conflict.

Appreciate your response, and yes, ultimately that's what we've had to do. However, having said that, it really shouldn't matter how many "cooks are in the kitchen" with regards to Web apps where it is implied multiple chefs are in the kitchen, especially where sync is involved. Eventually consistency should be built in to ensure the correct state of the data is the result of multiple touches by distributed apps/systems.

I would expect the latest data to "win," overwriting what was there before, no matter what system it was entered in with (Member Tools or online). If that doesn't happen, it sounds like a bug (for example, if the system is using the sync time instead of the time when data was entered, to determine which is latest).