I’ve put this down as a feature but it is really half bug/half feature!
My bank decided that I should renew my login credentials so disabled my old ones but failed to inform me of this until I happened to log in this morning to see if anything had happened as QF hadn’t pulled in any transactions for a few days.
Obviously QF has been trying to login and getting authentication failures for the last few days. It would be useful if the user was made aware of this as I could have sorted it out as soon as it first happened a few days ago.
It’s also very useful for us to know if the feed can’t login due to authentication failures as it saves our own resources mindlessly retrying every day. The problem is it’s very hard to know why a feed fails without complex pattern matching on the HTML response. The patterns can change without notice if the bank updates their website and it can cause the feed to do all manner of weird things.
What we can know with a high degree of certainty is if the feed reaches the dashboard (i.e. successfully logs in). We do plan to record this and disable any feeds whereby this hasn’t happened in 3 consecutive attempts. But that unfortunately is about the best we can do right now…of course the most favourable outcome is if the banks develop a simple data-feed, but that’s wishful thinking!
If that could be implemented then I’m assuming this would also be something that could be relayed to the user so it could be investigated. The problem I had was not so much that the feed wasn’t working but neither QF or the bank fed me any information at all so a ‘failed to import data for an unknown reason’ error would have been more useful than nothing.
We do actually record bank feed errors and items processed for our own diagnostic use. We’re now making these visible to all users, so in a couple of days you should see the following link in your bank feed settings area.
Later we plan to hook this up to a notification system to alert users when a login attempt fails on (2-3) consecutive attempts.
