Problem: Configuration changes are not immediately visible on Portals

Problem

After making a configuration change to the way a Portals page looks or works (for example, by changing a setting that affects a Portal), the affected page in the Portal does not update to display the change.

Other descriptions of the issue:

• Portal pages not updating after making configuration changes
• Portals not showing string resource changes
• Portals still showing old text after changing it
• Back end changes are not reflected on front end

Conditions

• Where: Any Portal page.
• Who: Affects users who are able to make configuration changes to the Portals (typically administrators).
• When: While viewing any page in a Portal, after making a configuration change in the Workbench.

Cause

To determine how pages in Portals should look and behave, Thentia Cloud uses a variety of entities in the database in which contain the relevant settings and configurations. Because accessing the data in these entities is relatively slow, Thentia Cloud employs "caching", a practice in which a "snapshot" of the Portal configuration is taken. The cache can be accessed much faster than the original configuration data, resulting in significantly speedier page load times.

However, the cache is a snapshot of the configuration at a particular moment in time, and does not automatically update when the underlying configuration changes. As a result, any changes that you make to the Portal configuration in the Workbench will not be reflected on the affected Portal pages until you make a new configuration snapshot (i.e. refresh the cache).

Steps to resolve

Whenever you make a change in the Workbench that changes the way a Portals page looks or behaves, that page will not reflect the change until the configuration cache is updated.

To resolve the issue, you need to flush (refresh) the Portals configuration cache, which will update it and cause the configuration changes to be applied to the Portals.

To flush the Portals configuration cache, follow these steps:

1. After making any changes to Portal configurations in the Thentia Cloud Workbench, click the   Modules button, then click on Config:
   
2. The Configuration module will open, and will display the Portal Configuration Record List. Here, click the   Flush Data button in the menu bar:
   
3. You will see a notification that the cache flush is in progress, followed by another notification when it is completed:
   
4. After you have flushed the cache, open (or reload) the affected Portals page(s) to check your changes.