A 'Gotcha' in Caching that I want to share! | XM Community

A 'Gotcha' in Caching that I want to share!

  • 5 April 2018
  • 6 replies
  • 255 views
Michael_Campbell_RedPepper
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While doing custom development, I was running into an issue where my CSS and JS wasn't always updating in my anonymous testing link survey. A short phone call with Qualtrics Support pointed out a few ways to speed up the development process that I want to share!

This might be obvious to some, but it cost me time, and I don't want the same to happen to you:

1) When doing custom code, make sure that the following option is turned OFF:

!

(This is the one I missed) This, when enabled, allows users to return to the last survey they were in, and unbeknownst to me, also includes the code from that last attempt. Disabling this gives them a fresh copy of the survey, with a new default state and the *new code*, every time.

2) Make sure that you're doing a hard refresh in between taking the surveys. Here is some more information on that if you're not familiar with it!

http://refreshyourcache.com/en/cache/

3) Know that your changes may take a minute to propagate. I know, this isn't a step, and it may seem obvious, but I make sure to keep this in mind as I develop.

Hope this helps!! Happy developing!

Mike

6 replies

R
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Userlevel 5
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Michael_Campbell_RedPepper Hi Mike,
Just ran into this issue but unticking that option didn't seem to work. I'm using Chrome and it's true as soon as you add another character on the end of the URL it will refresh the cache but if you use the same URL each time the chache won't update. I thought about using a time stamp in the URL and then the URL is different everytime but it's not really fixing the issue at the heart of the problem. My problem is more to do with piped text and a change to the question text.

Hope you can advise?

Thanks

Rod

N
Userlevel 1

Due to heavy and somehow intransparent caching, developing with JS and external CSS is a real pain in Qualtrics. Even with clearing caches, hard refresh and publishing the survey several times, I can't get rid of cached JS in questions (added in default code section). I also tried it with preview and publishing.
What do I have to do to get over this deeply annoying issue?
Rod_Pestell wrote something about adding characters to the end of the URL, can someone specify how to do this precisely? I concatenated characters to the URL by adding an ?-sign followed by characters (in preview and published survy as well), but no success.

R
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Userlevel 5
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Hi novern
Just add an ampersand (&) and then anything you like. I do a time stamp as the previous time stamp will never occur again. I also do find logging out and back in helps oh and also if you have a bookmark in place that also doesn't let the JS code nor questions update I find.
Thanks
Rod Pestell

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Userlevel 1

Rod_Pestell Thanks, the ampersand helped! I just didn't understand what you meant by "… and also if you have a bookmark in place that also doesn't let the JS code nor questions update I find".

R
Rank
Userlevel 5
Badge +11

When you're previewing a survey you have a button at the top which says bookmark. It's used to jump to a question rather than having to go through the whole survey when testing it. I find that JS code or questions won't update to the latest version if you still have a bookmark in place.

Does that help?

Thanks

Rod Pestell

N
Userlevel 1

Rod_Pestell Yeah, that helped!

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