[Qgis-developer] strange GetCapabilities caching

[Nicklas Avén]

Hallo all

First, Thanks a lot for QGIS and QGIS Server. It is  amazing software.

But now I have had a very frustrating problem for the last 5 hours.

After setting up a working QGIS server a few weeks ago, I now returned
to see everything working after some major refactoring at the database.

Nothing worked, and after some hours I started to get really frustrated
since we have just a few weeks until we go in production and I really
don't want to replace QGIS Server because of unpredictable behavior.

The error I had was:
Invalid Layer: WMS provider Cannot calculate extent Raster layer
Provider is not valid (provider: wms, URI:
contextualWMSLegend=0&crs=EPSG:4326&dpiMode=7&featureCount=10 ...

on all layers but one. 

I saw this question was asked several times at the net, but no one
seemed to have had any answer:
https://hub.qgis.org/issues/10634
https://hub.qgis.org/issues/7712
http://osgeo-org.1560.x6.nabble.com/qgisserver-problem-td5095165.html


The last link solved it by a fresh install and now I understand why.

Finally I found the answer
http://osgeo-org.1560.x6.nabble.com/WMS-provider-Cannot-calculate-extent-td5250516.html

But the OP didn't get an answer of his follow up question: Why the h...
is the GetCapabilities cached?

I ask the same thing, especially since a new version of GetCapabilities
is also fetched.

This is what made me use 5 hours on debugging (including turning the
server inside out, both database and uwsgi, nginx and so on).

The layers presented when connecting to the wms server was fresh and
new. But it seems like, when I tried to add the layer it used a cached
GetCapabilities, which didn't correspond to my new setup on the server. 

I could also sniff the GetCapabilities request. But I also saw that no
request was made when I tried to add the layer. So, now when I see the
whole picture I look rather stupid, but I couldn't imagine that I had
fresh data when connecting, but old data when trying to add the map.

Another thing that made things bad was the error message just flashing
on the top of my map. It didn't write anything to the log windows from
what I could see, and the message was shown in a too thin box. So I had
to try to add the layer, quickly close the "Add WMS window" and copy the
text in the too thin box to be able to read it.

Sorry for my frustrated tone. I still really love QGIS. But software
(any software) can drive you crazy sometimes.

I also suspect that I might get into exactly the same trap after a few
months when i have forgotten this. I hope I find this mail then on my
googling :-)

Regards

Nicklas Avén