Liberty4 Consignment Known Issues

These are known issues with the Liberty4 Consignment consignment software system.

Resaleworld, if any of these issues are fixed in an update, please post a comment below with the version that fixes said issue and I will update this post.  Thank you!

Known Issues

  • When adding an account Note, if the field contains greater than 255 characters, you will receive a String or Binary Data Would Be Truncated error.  Tying on-screen feedback to the text changed event to let the user know once they’ve reached the limit, disabling the Save button, or providing a clearer error message, would resolve this issue.
  • Point of Sale takes 30 seconds or more to load, when utilizing Payment Logistics for credit card processing.
  • If RWD.exe is unable to connect to the database, TTimer, which polls every second, will continue to remain active and polling, thus triggering never-ending Connection Failure pop-ups/program crash dialogs until the RWD.exe process is manually killed.
  • When viewing the Account Detail screen, focus/tab index is set to Tab #1.  If a barcode is scanned, it will overwrite the account number and due to the  nature of barcode readers (i.e. they perform a carriage return), focus will then tab to the First Name field.  The result is the Account #, First Name, and Last Name will be erased and replaced with the Item ID.  Proactively preventing this change by either making the fields read only, or trapping barcode scanning input, would resolve this.
  • If RWD.exe crashes/ends unexpectedly, it will erase the RWD.cfg file and replace it with “{“Shutdown”:”1″}“.  The result is Liberty can no longer connect to the database or access its settings until RWD.cfg is restored from backup.
  • The Liberty update breaks its Taskbar shortcuts, making them white/null shortcuts.  This is reproducible through 4.5d.
  • Clicking the Item # column on the Inventory tab to sort, will not sort the datagrid the very first time it’s clicked.  It has to be clicked a second time and from that point on, it will sort accordingly.
  • Blank Coupons can be created in Point of Sale (i.e. no form validation), which will break reports which attempt to show Coupon data — i.e. you cannot run the report for your blank coupon, even though you can select the blank coupon.
  • RWDBUtil.exe does not utilize multi-threaded programming techniques and thus, the interface locks-up/becomes unresponsive for 20+ seconds while attempting to connect to an inaccessible database.
  • The login dialog suffers from a focus issue, which results in the login dialog losing focus and going behind any windows that pop-up along with it — e.g. the splash screen.  Attempts have been made to resolve this, by closing the splash screen after 5 seconds, but the focus issue persists and the login remains hidden until the splash screen goes away.
  • Liberty will crash and generate an Access Violation, if you attempt to print tags and your printer is offline/unavailable.
  • The default range of tags to print is 1-99999, thus, if the user clicks ok, Liberty will attempt to print tags for all items in their account.  Checking to see how many tags are about to be printed, allowing the user to set this threshold, and trapping the attempt with a confirmation dialog, would resolve this.
  • If Liberty’s RWDBack.exe backup utility is scheduled to make automatic backups, it will continue to make backups until it fills-up the backup destination.  Backups will ultimately fail, without warning.  Allowing the user to set a finite amount of backups to keep, checking the available disk space, and providing a proactive alert to the user, would resolve this.
  • Liberty utilizes the Float data type for storing prices, resulting in penny rounding issues.
  • The period is at the beginning of the sentence, “.Backup task completed successfully” in Liberty’s RWDBack.exe backup utility.  This has persisted through the last 5 updates.

I am a Software Developer, System Administrator, and consignment software specialist. I currently manage hundreds of consignment workstations, point of sale systems, and database servers all across North America and I am the developer of Peeps' Software, Peeps2Go, and Peeps' Consignor Login for iOS and Android. I've been helping consignment & resale store-owners since 2003. I started The Computer Peeps in February of 2010. Peeps' Software launched in 2016 and is now on hundreds of systems all across North America. I have successfully converted dozens of stores from all of the major consignment software systems. After 20 years of working with consignment stores, I understand the unique challenges consignment & resale store-owners face. From electrical issues in old buildings or strip malls, to advocating for them when their old consignment software keeps crashing.

2 thoughts on “Liberty4 Consignment Known Issues

  1. Russell Levy

    Please note that communicating issues directly to Resaleworld via the Support Department or Message Board is the best way to see that issues are addressed as quickly as possible.

    Account note – truncated:
    The field is limited to 1024 characters, not 255. We can look at limiting the input in the UI.

    POS load time:
    This issue does not, and never has existed with Payment Logistics. This issue does exist with the Vantiv EMV integration IF and only if customer is not set up to process true EMV transactions. This is due to a process required by Vantiv in such scenarios. That said, there’s no reason for a customer to have an EMV device and not be processing true EMV transactions.

    Cascading Unable to Connect to Database errors:
    This is being addressed in our 4.6 release

    Account Detail – focus on tab 1:
    This is being addressed in our 4.6 release

    Inventory module crash, rwd.cfg corruption:
    Unable to duplicate behavior in current versions of Liberty. I strongly believe that this would have only been present in version 4.3a, as we made a change to where this setting was written (it is now saved to the registry, rather than rwd.cfg)

    Liberty update breaking taskbar shortcuts:
    This is more of an issue with Windows Installer than anything else, however we’re going to see if we can find a way to mitigate this.

    Clicking Item# column header does nothing on first click:
    Unable to duplicate on current version

    POS allows for unnamed coupons
    We are looking into addressing this in our 4.6 release

    RWDBUtil not multi-threaded
    I’ll see about getting that addressed the next time we need to modify RWDBUtil for anything. I’m not going to ask our developers to make a change and recompile for only this issue.

    Login screen focus issue
    Unable to duplicate – additional information would be helpful (specific OS, does it happen consistently for certain users, etc)

    Access Violation printing tags to offline/unavailable printer
    Unable to duplicate in current version of Liberty

    Tag Printing Item Number Range
    The default, if printing from the inventory grid, is current item number through 99999. I’ve added an issue to consider adding an option to better control this behavior. It will be considered in a future release.

    RWDBack – no limits on scheduled backups
    This is being addressed in 4.6

    Penny rounding issues
    All rounding issues that we are currently aware of have been addressed

    RWDBack – punctuation at the beginning of sentences
    Everyone can breath a long sigh of relief, this has been addressed in 4.6.

  2. Dean

    Holy crap, you’re full of excuses. 😀 If you don’t know what the 30 second delay is and how that got into a production release, then, well, it speaks for itself.

    I know it’s not 255. The fact that this issue has existed for over a decade, is the issue. Really poor UX. Really poor.

    Poor UX

    You could fix this in one minute:

    One minute fix

    Dear god, someone’s finally looking at how TTimer has no error handling? I’ve reported this multiple times. I shouldn’t have to though. Anyone who actually supports this software for even a week, can see that issue and how poorly it handles the exception. Someone shouldn’t have to tell you about this — your programmer should know better.

    If you install Liberty updates even once, you would’ve seen the Taskbar icons breaking every single time. That I had to point it out, is telling.

    Do a clean install of Liberty on a clean machine @ sorting the column. It’s been reproducible for well over 7 years. It’s the datagrid.

    You’ve got issues @ form validation all over the software. The blank POS coupon is just one example. Why isn’t someone going through these screens on a regular basis?

    You must not really understand the focus issue. You tried to ‘fix’ it with a workaround @ making the splash screen go away after so many seconds. The focus issue is not only on the login screen, but multiple screens throughout the software. I must support the software far more than you do, if you haven’t seen this and the fact that you even tried to fix it with a workaround, should be clear enough.

    This reply is seriously a waste of time. You might be able to get over on customers, but you can’t get over on me. I recommend spending the weekend and try to learn how to code. You’re either being lied to by someone, or you know exactly what I’m saying.

    You make it sound like “recompiling” is magic and so difficult. If you can’t recompile to fix a bug, you’ve got bigger issues. I’m not even going to address how silly that sounds. You’re over exaggerating and trying to come off like software development is magic.

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