When doing a Zen Cart upgrade or any similar upgrade it is always a good idea to do a test of the upgrade first, since unexpected issues can come up and by doing a test first you can more easily work thorough those instead of trying to triage a broken production website. When we are hired to do Zen Cart upgrades we always do that.
That came in handy during a recent upgrade from Zen Cart 1.5.5a to 1.5.6a where we ran into what is an obscure enough issue we couldn’t find any mentions of it when we were troubleshooting it.
After we ran the database updater we found that the instead of being served the website we got an error message, “An Error occurred, please refresh the page and try again.”.Looking at the related error log file in the “logs” directory it was indicated that the sessions table didn’t exist in the database:
PHP Fatal error: 1146:Table ‘[databasebprefix]_sessions’ doesn’t exist :: select value
Looking at the databases for the production website and the test we found that the table existed prior to the database update, but not after.
Looking at the database changes made during the 1.5.6 update we found that the table is dropped and recreated, so for some reason the recreation was failing.
In looking at the debug log for the database updater we found that there were multiple errors like this:
MySQL error 1273 encountered during zc_install:
Unknown collation: ‘utf8mb4_general_ci’
) ENGINE=InnoDB;
After looking at various things we found that in the configuration file, configure.php, for the frontend of the website the “DB_CHARSET” was undefined. Defining that as “utf8”, re-importing the database, and starting the database update process over resolved the errors and the table was properly recreated.
Further in the process we found the apparent reason for the “DB_CHARSET” being missing , it was causing characters to be improperly encoded, which we were able to resolve by simply changing the charset to proper one for those characters.