Geocoding failures kill contributions
Overview
Last night between about 6pm and midnight AEDT, it appears that Nominatim (the Open Street Map API provider) had an intermittent outage. Some requests were receiving a 502 error. We have configured this as our Geocoding provider in CiviCRM under /civicrm/admin/setting/mapping?reset=1
People who were using CiviCRM in ways which caused the Geomapping provider to be called were receiving fatal errors as a result. This included people who were making donations (i.e. entering their address on the form which in turn was handed to the Geomapping provider for geocoding).
Current behaviour
When a request to the Geomapping provider fails (for example with a 502 error), the generating transaction within CiviCRM returns a fatal error and does not complete. This includes financial transactions, and indeed any administrative function that involves adding or updating a contact's address.
Expected behaviour
A Geomapping provider failure should never cause financial transactions to fail. I can't think of any reason why adding or updating an address should fail either. Fatal errors should only occur when an issue occurs which genuinely prevent a transaction from succeeding. A payment can still be processed regardless of whether that person's address can be geocoded or not. I expect a 502 Bad Gateway error from Nominatim would be logged, but never cause an address to fail to be added/updated. Obviously that would occur without the latitude/longitude being recorded. I can't even see the utility in informing the user. It's a system admin problem.
Environment information
- CiviCRM: 5.35.2
- PHP: 7.3_
- CMS: Drupal 7.82
- Database: MariaDB 10.4.21
- Web Server: Nginx 1.10.3
Comments
Anything else you would like the reviewer to note.