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Solution: strange problem with 'current page thing' being empty on detail pages

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#1

I was going to post this a question, but I figured it out and thought it might be useful for some folks.

Context: list / detail pages for users (would apply to any thing I guess…)

Symptom: clicking through from the list of users to the user detail page resulted in ‘current page user’ always being blank for some records

  • wasn’t a data privacy issue
  • no errors in the logs
  • no useful info in debug mode

Problem: A 3rd party system I was previously integrating with didn’t trim first name, last name, or email address fields and I was building the slug from the name data. My API workflow wasn’t trimming that info either.

After trimming the trailing spaces from the slug, the detail pages now work. In my case, this was really old data, all of my user data is trimmed and email addresses are converted to lower case as well.

Now I get to run a workflow on 11,000 user records to seek and destroy other bad data. Yippee. Hope this prevents someone from ripping their hair out.

#2

Such problems and updates to old data are quite frequent in my cases. And it really hurts to create separate API workflows to update all so many records each time.

In the ‘capacity world’ at least I could run these workflows at our off hours and prevent my app load from getting impacted.

In the new “WU world”, whatever time you run it, the app won’t be impacted as such (probably), but you’d see a noticeable hole in your pocket.