[Slashcode-development] caching vs updating templates

[Randall H. <li...@so...>]

Folks ~

I've been doing plugin development and I'm having trouble with what appears to be Slash's template caching.  I've tried this in several browsers (Moz, Konq, Lynx) with identical results.

When I make a change to a template, often the site doesn't update.  Say I remove some text or a button from a template.  Template-tool updates the template successfully, the changes appear correct in the Admin interface, but when I browse the page they don't always appear.  I say "always" advisedly, because sometimes they do and sometimes they don't.  I can hit the browser's "Refresh" 10 times and get 3 different versions of the page, even after clearing the browser cache.

The second weird thing that happens is that sometimes Slash doesn't find the template at all.  Here's a sample line from the site's error log:

[Tue Mar 18 01:37:55 2003] [error] /n4n4.pl:Slash::Display::Provider:/usr/local/lib/perl/5.6.1/Slash/Display/Provider.pm:81:Failed template lookup on 'edit_org;n4n4[misc];default[default]', callers: Slash::Display line 228, Apache::ROOTrancid::n4n4_2epl line 66, Apache::ROOTrancid::n4n4_2epl line 43

This happens although every tool I can use (the Admin interface, template-tool, querying the database directly) shows me the template just as it should be.  It often happens after I update a template.

I've managed to avoid these errors somewhat (but not completely) by setting 'cache_enabled' to 0, but I've not spent enough time in the code to understand exactly how caching works.  Is this behavior expected, or abnormal?  Does anyone have any help, or pointers to other resources?

Thanks muchly,

Randall