DO NOT CLEAR CACHE

If you decide to use the clear cache feature, see the instructions at the bottom of this document first.

The clear cache in the browser is really a "There are bad people out there, get rid of the bad people" feature.

The Clear cache feature is also used by "There are incompetent programmers out there, fix their mistakes". While once in a very rare case, you will need to clear cache to get around a bug by a good programmer, if you find yourself being told to 'clear cache' by a computer company - it is a very clear sign that their code is written very poorly. As of writing this (2003.06) in our 20 year history, and 1000's of users, we have only used "clear cache" to solve user problems 5 times. And 3 of those where when we shipped test code to the user at their request, so it was known to be 'not ready for production.'

To be fair to the developers, some support departments will also use 'clear cache' as a "go away so I can mark the ticket as closed and keep my closed ticket percentages high" or a "go away so I can have some time to think of a better answer." In that case the problem is incompetent support people or support people who don't receive proper training or proper lines of communication with their development teams.

There are ways to clear the browser cache, but please do not do this globally or for our site. When you clear your cache you:

• Delete all of your data without our code having any warning whatsoever; this is because of 'bad actors', evil people who would write code that would do bad things when you clear your cache to try to get rid of them.
• In particular this means the browser will

• Delete without any chance for us to save it, any information you have entered but has not been sync'd to your server.
• Delete any information about licenses you are consuming, so your licenses are locked until they expire (concurrent) or until they have not been seen for a long enough time (named)
• Delete all the files (including images) that the browser is caching. This isn't serious, it just means a time delay for you to get them again. If you have no pending data to save, and you only use concurrent licenses, it may only mean that the licenses you had will be locked until they time out. But clearing the browser cache is like using a sledge hammer to kill a fly.

The only valid common reasons for doing a browser clear cache are:

• You have some viruses or similar by bad actors, in which case you should only clear the cache for those web sites.
• You are using an app or application that has some very big bugs and there is really truly no other way around it, in which case you should only clear the cache for those
• You selling the device or otherwise disposing of it

But yes, once in a while, even with competent programmers, you will be asked to 'clear cache' to get around a problem. If it is from our team, you can be assured that either we have already released a patch or we will soon release a patch to avoid you having to do it again, at least for that reason!

BUT IF YOU ARE GOING TO CLEAR YOUR BROWSER CACHE - BEFORE YOU DO, PLEASE DO THE FOLLOWING: If you decide you are going to clear the cache, even just some web sites, to be safe please do the following first:

• Make sure all the changes you care about are saved; your last change should be at least 1 minute ago and the sync icon should be blue and have a check mark inset icon on it.

• Warning If you have more than one database - make sure that you have saved your changes in all of them.

• Make sure you have logged out, and you have given it time connected to release your licenses; when offline it can't tell the server it was released, and there will be a message on the login screen saying it is trying to release your licenses if it is having problems releasing them

Then you can clear the browser cache without damaging yourself, other than it will take longer to get started next time you log in, because everything - code and data - has to be reloaded to your device.

Note: For those reading that are developers, yes, during development there are reasonable uses of 'clear cache'. The comments are not intended to suggest that developers DURING DEVELOPMENT who use clear cache are incompetent. The comments above are for users of production, deployed applications, and for those, we make no apologies saying that the regular use of 'clear cache' is a clear sign of incompetent developers or support departments. But no offence is intended, and the comments don't apply, for developers using it DURING development and testing.

SAFARI Clear Cache doesn't work. Circa 2023.06

Note: As of 2023.06, the Safari browser clear cache is 'well known' since v5 to not properly clear cache. In particular, the 'IndexedDB databases' are not cleared. In our case this is likely a good thing, but we suspect at some point in the future Safari will be more spec compliant, so this bug cannot be relied on staying.