We're new to webfocus and only have a few dashboards live at the moment, but we're trying to push out a whole bunch more in the next few weeks. Almost all have a form with begin/end date fields, submit and reset buttons.

With the reports that are live, and the ones that are being tested now, we're seeing weird, intermittent, hard to reproduce issues with the forms and I don't really know where to begin even looking for a solution.

Here's an example:
I'm using javascript to calculate the begin/end date of the previous month as a default. The values are set in the onload function. Running it from Dev Studio, it worked fine and the dates were calculated as 3/1-3/31. Running it from the dashboard today, calculated the dates as 2/1-2/28. I modified the java just to show an alert box of the current month to check what was going on, ran my dashboard again and suddenly I get the correct months.

Other users have reported things like not being able to change the date prompts; or we've seen things like even though a date prompt (and other prompts as well that are NOT being manipulated with javascript) are set to a value, the output of the report has ignored that filter. Closing the browswer and re-opening seems to solve this, which seems to suggest some kind of caching issue to me, but I have no idea what to do to solve this.

Has anyone experienced anything like this? or have any suggestions??

Thanks!

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Kerry,

Are you sure that the web browser you're using is compatible with WebFOCUS 7.6.10? Microsoft Internet Explorer is a fussy beast.

Indeed, this sounds like caching to me too.
There are at least four ways to avoid this.
1. use forms with method=post
2. have each user (or do it centrally) set up IE so, that it removes the cache upon closure of the browser
3. there is a meta command that you put in the header of the html file that will prevent chaching. Don;t know the exact syntax, but you can find it on the internet.
4. add a random number to each and every request you do, making the request fairly unique thereby forcing the browser to not use cache.
There may be more ways, these four just came to my mind. One is easier to implement than the other but I'm quite convinced that one of these will solve your problem.

Hope this helps....

I'm not convinced that caching causes this: "Running it from the dashboard today, calculated the dates as 2/1-2/28. I modified the java just to show an alert box of the current month to check what was going on, ran my dashboard again and suddenly I get the correct months."

IE will try to check if a requested source has changed. If not it will try to load a cached page. If it finds a cached page, you'll get it. If that is the case, nothing will be recalculated, you'll see the page as it occurs in cache.
If some part of the page has changed (as it happened to be by adding an alert or some such thing): no caching, fresh page.
I've seen this happen a lot of times. Even 'refresh page' does not always help. Clearing cache and then refresh did (or hitting refresh with ctrl key pressed - a 'hard' refresh).

Yes, I'm pretty sure the dates not recalculating is a caching issue but I am still unable to resolve it.

I also googled and found that adding this to my html head should work, it did not.





My forms already are using method=post. It seems to me that this would not affect the default dates because these are calculated onload and not on submit.

I would gladly add a random number to this html page- if I only knew how. The page is accessed through a dashboard. I don't really see how I can manipulate the dashboard urls that load these pages.

While preparing this response, I did some further googling and found that Tomcat can actually be caching my html files at the server level. I have tried deleting my browser's cache (and deleting all temporary internet files) and reloading the pages and my dates are still incorrect; I also tried a "hard" refresh and still nothing. I also tried modifying the url directly in the address bar, adding "&var=343434" to it, figuring this would mimic the random number request. Still no recalculation of the javascript. This is leading me to believe that its Tomcat caching the page as a static file.

There is a context setting that can be used, cachingAllowed, that can be set in the $CATALINA_HOME/conf/context.xml. Many people claimed this either didn't work or crashed Tomcat 5.5, which is exactly what it did for me.


Anyone with any other suggestions on this?

There was a post on this last week. Someone metioned another option you could place in the HTML with a meta tag. This is what I found when I googled the topic. I haven't had a chance to test it though.

 
<META HTTP-EQUIV="CACHE-CONTROL" CONTENT="NO-CACHE">

If a focexec is alling the html page passs &RANDOM within the link

-SET &RANDOM = RDUNIF(D5) * RDUNIF(D5) * 10000;



Otherwise javascript solution :

var UniqueTime = new Date();
UniqueTime = UniqueTime.getTime();

Then pass UniqueTime within the URL

hope this helps