T3 Cultivation Tools Bug - Vegetative Plants

All cultivation tools are disabled for CA users in the 1.99.1 release.

This is a temporary measure while I am verifying the problem is fixed.

A patch is deployed in v1.99.2, and all cultivation tools are re-enabled in this release.

This patch fully corrects the underlying issue. I will follow up with a postmortem shortly.

Postmortem

Background

Not all Metrc states operate in exactly the same way. The state of California's plant implementation has several deviations from the norm, including skipping the Vegetative plant phase entirely. When promoting plant batches to mature plants, they skip this phase and go directly to Flowering.

T3 Cultivation and Package tools are really just wrappers for Metrc forms. It's all the same data going to the same place, the only difference is that T3 tools are designed to allow users to enter this data as efficiently as possible. To account for the differences between states, T3's architecture implements a "DynamicConstManager" module. This module reads all the values out of forms (options in dropdowns, autocomplete values, etc) and uses them to render T3's tools. This way, T3 tools are fully compatible with all Metrc states.

Metrc's forms are all built in slightly different ways. These forms often need to handle large collections of objects (tags, packages, etc), and loading all these at once is impractical. Metrc's solution to this is to use autocomplete and only load a small number at a time, but this autocomplete is not used everywhere.

Problem Presentation

On Monday, June 7, a T3 user reached out to me about a problem they were experiencing with T3. The T3 promote plants tool was not loading at all, and T3 telemetry indicated other users were not experiencing this issue.

After investigation, I discovered that this license had a gigantic number of plant tags, and the source form that DynamicConstManager was attempting to load did not use autocomplete, and instead was attempting to load all the plant tags at once. Loading this form was crashing the T3 tool.

Since the only consts that T3 needed out of this form were plant growth phases, I chose to instead just hardcode the available phases based on the current hostname. However, the hostname check in California was failing, and therefore was offering Vegetative and Flowering phases when only Flowering should have been eligible. The Vegetative phase became the default form value, and so California T3 users were not checking this dropdown when submitting as there had only ever been one value there before (Flowering).

The patch went out the same day (v1.97.0), and gradually was rolled out over the next few days.

Solution

I was made aware of the issue on Friday, July 11. A patch (v1.99.2) was deployed within an hour, fixing the hostname checks.

Affected Users

Only California users who submitted using the promote immature plants tool in T3 with versions between 1.97.0 and 1.99.0 were affected. T3 analytics indicates this is a very small number of users.

Timeline

• Monday, July 7
  • [3:00PM CT] T3 user emails me indicating problem with Promote Immature Plants tool
  • [4:30PM CT] v1.97.0 patch containing the bug is published
• Tuesday, July 8
  • Patch begins rolling out to users
• Friday, July 11
  • [6:00PM CT] DCC notifies affected users that they have Vegetative plants in their licenses. I am notified of issue by licensee.
  • [6:05PM CT] v1.99.1 patch is published, totally disables all cultivation tools in T3
  • [7:00PM CT] v1.99.2 patch is published, fixing the bug
  • [9:30PM CT] Affected users are notified