Cached browser data

The challenges of dealing with the browser cache and local storage.

All interactions with OLab take place via a web browser (Chrome, Edge, Firefox etc.) In order to speed things up and make your browsing experience smoother, all web browsers now store a lot of data on your local machine so that they don't have to keep pestering the web server for the same data. This generally works smoothly and we are unaware of it.

But what if the data on the server changes? Sometimes your browser will keep on using the cached or locally stored version.

The most common time that we see this with OLab is when a case author makes changes to the content: edit some nodes, changes some links… that kind of stuff. The author makes these changes in the Designer and then checks to see if these changes look ok in the Player.

But because of the browser cache, you will see the same stuff that the server last sent you, and it looks like your changes were not saved in the Designer.

The usual fix for this is simply to Logout of the Player and Login again on that same browser. You do not usually need to do this on the Designer and this is one reason why we recommend that you use a different browser for the Player and the Designer. Make sense? And when you Login back to the Player, you should now see the effects of your new edits.

This should soon be improved when OL-202 is implemented.

If you are having trouble with cached user credentials, try logging into a map anonymously e.g. https://logan.cardinalcreek.ca/playerdebug/1760/0 - this map requires no login credentials at all. Once you are in, you can then [LOGOUT] which will clear user credentials from the browser cache.

Local storage

Frustratingly, this does not always work. Sometimes you also have to mess with something called Local Storage on your browser. The most common situation for this is if we have recently made some changes to OLab code and there is a new version.

The fixes for this can become a wee bit arcane. Check out https://olab.ca/browser-cache-problems-when-authoring/ for some other tricks to try.