[Treebase-devel] TreeBASE malfunction

[William P. <wil...@ya...>]

Something bizarre seems to be happening to TreeBASE -- it was not a problem as late as 7/30, but it seems to be a problem as of 8/5. I'm not sure what happened between 7/30 and 8/5, but I'm now getting the following new symptoms:

- Normally, when I click the "log out" link, I can log out. Now it still behaves as though I'm logged in even after clicking "log out".

- With the "Submit" button, I am normally required to log in, and then after successfully logging in I'm normally directed to a list of my existing submissions. Now after logging in I'm immediately presented with the login screen again. (but if I click the "Search" button I'm offered a "Submissions" tab, so I can get to this that way). 

- Normally, if I'm logged in and I click the "Citations" link, I get to see the citation metadata for my submission, now I get another "log in" screen regardless of the fact that I'm already logged in. 

Emptying my local cache and blocking browser caching does not solve the problem. Switching from Safari to FireFox, Camino, etc, also solves nothing.

My sense is that this problem comes from server-side caching that's gone out of control. The only caching we should do is for links that pull data, e.g.:

http://purl.org/phylo/treebase/phylows/study/TB2:S1000?format=nexml
http://purl.org/phylo/treebase/phylows/study/TB2:S1000?format=nexus
http://purl.org/phylo/treebase/phylows/matrix/TB2:M553?format=nexus
http://purl.org/phylo/treebase/phylows/matrix/TB2:M553?format=nexml
http://purl.org/phylo/treebase/phylows/tree/TB2:Tr4105?format=nexus
http://purl.org/phylo/treebase/phylows/tree/TB2:Tr4105?format=nexml

… which I think means redirecting to URLs that look like:

/treebase-web/search/downloadAStudy.html
/treebase-web/search/study/anyObjectAsRDF.rdf
/treebase-web/search/study/summary.html
/treebase-web/search/downloadANexusFile.html
/treebase-web/search/downloadAMatrix.html
/treebase-web/search/downloadATree.html
/treebase-web/search/downloadAnAnalysisStep.html

But we don't want it to cache these:

http://treebase.org/treebase-web/search/studySearch.html
http://treebase.org/treebase-web/search/treeSearch.html
http://treebase.org/treebase-web/search/matrixSearch.html
http://treebase.org/treebase-web/search/taxonSearch.html

.. because the results are unstable. Also, we don't want to cache the user and admin pages, such as these:

http://treebase.org/treebase-web/user/submissionList.html
http://treebase.org/treebase-web/user/citationForm.html
(etc)

or these:

http://treebase.org/treebase-web/admin/administrationPage.html
http://treebase.org/treebase-web/admin/readyStateStudies.html
(etc)

bp