#55 Start Plugin not working.

[Anonymous]

hi

We have installed EasyRec 0.98 and 0.99 version and are getting recommendations the next day.But the manual way of getting recommnedations via the "Start Plugin" in the Administration page is not working.
Are we missing any steps here?

We are inserting the "view" action and are looking for "most viewed" recommendations.

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

The result when the plugin icon is clicked is

Plugin http://www.easyrec.org/plugins/slopeone/0.98 computed no new rules for easyrectest in 0 seconds.
Plugin http://www.easyrec.org/plugins/ARM/0.98 computed no new rules for easyrectest in 0 seconds.
Plugin http://www.easyrec.org/plugins/ARM/0.98 computed no new rules for easyrectest in 0 seconds.
Plugin http://www.easyrec.org/plugins/ARM/0.98 computed no new rules for easyrectest in 0 seconds.

[Stephan Zavrel]

Hi!

First of all, the output you pasted actually shows that the "Start Plugin" button IS working so the title of this issue is a bit misleading.

There are a lot of reason why you cannot get any results, but it is difficult to see what's wrong with so little information in your specific case.

Some general remarks:

• The "most viewed" recommendation is not even dependent on the plugin subsystem, so it should work regardless of whether the plugins create rules or not. You are most likely running into a caching issue. "most viewed" is done using some costly SQL queries and therefore the result is cached for 24h (in production environments it is usually not necessary to have top lists that are more up-to-date).
  So regardless of the actions you send into the system, if you called "most viewed" with an empty result set once, it will only update 24h later and show refreshed list. You can either restart the server to clear the cache during development or adjust the "timetolive" value for the RANKINGS_CACHE in the easyrec-utils resource folder ehcache.xml file.

• Back to plugin execution: you can see a more detailed output of the plugin system if you go to the Administration section and there use the "Plugin Logs" menu. There you can see entries for every plugin run together with more output if you click on "Details". Post some of that here if your problems remain.

• The Slope One plugin is purely rating based. If you don't send any "rate" actions, no rules will ever be created from that plugin.

• Make sure your actions actually reach the system and are for the right tenant. Do you see the actions in the diagram on the overview page when you log in?

• Finally, there is still the possibility that the distribution of the actions you send simply does not facilitate the creation of rules. If there simply are no commonalities in user behaviour, they also cannot be found.

Hope the points above help you to solve your issues.
Greetings Stephan

[Anonymous]

Thanks a lot for the detailed reply. The actions are for the correct tenant and i can see the actions in the diagram in the overview page.Also the actions were listed in the items and rules page.

We were under the impression that the recommendations in the top ranked page was related to the plugin execution which is incorrect. Thanks for the details

We are getting the recommendations in the top ranked page the next day. For a demo purpose, we need to show the recommendations coming out without waiting for 24 hours.
When we tried with huge data, say 4000 records (all view actions), the top ranked page got populated. But this was not consistent. 2 out of 4 times, this worked.

Restarting the server is always getting us new recommendation populated in the top ranked page and this also works only for large no of records.But we cant go for this method for demo

Thanks and Regards

[Stephan Zavrel]

Hi!

I'll try to move the ehcache.xml configuration file to the easyrec-web project for the next release so it is easier to modify caching behaviour in future versions.

Greetings Stephan