“We just updated this page. Please refresh the page to get the latest version. You will not be able to use the app until you refresh.”
Users get the same notification bar as I do when I am previewing the app and change something. This is a huge problem as users are recording sessions and if I upload something new, then they must refresh the screen and they loose their session. Is there a way for the live version to be updated and not screw up every current user at the moment?
If not, then months and months of time on this platform and thousands of dollars spent on developers and subscriptions has all been for nothing.
You are supposed to use the preview section in order to test your features and then they will not see the update page bar so long as you do not deploy the application because then it will appear for live users. You will of course need to copy any databases from your live version to your development to preview it and test it.
@daine, I’m not sure whether there’s a currently a solution for this - perhaps someone else knows a way to minimize this?
I suspect eliminating this notification and forced refresh may be technologically difficult. That said, if this is critical for you, definitely reach out to Bubble’s team and see if this is something they can build on a sponsored basis – they offer this model of funding features so that you don’t even have to start over because that would suck for everyone involved.
What I can say is that updating a website with custom code is usually a much more time consuming process that impacts users in significantly more material ways and sometimes even breaks. So, Bubble is big improvement over the processes I’ve used with custom code applications. In fact, this is why upgrades are typically pushed late at night. Often, sites will even go down for “scheduled maintenance” for up to a few hours because it’s not trivial to update a website, change a database, refresh the cache, etc.
So, perhaps there’s another solution you could put in place that’s similar to how other sites do it such as schedule updates ahead of time and setting you app to, perhaps, notify users if they login within an hour or your scheduled maintenance. Some sites even email everyone, although that’s definitely not ideal.
I sure hope you’re able to find a release process that enables you to continue.
He says. “Doc, it hurts when I do this. Can you help?”
Doc says, “Absolutely. Don’t do that.”
cue laugh track *
But seriously, don’t push updates at a time when you have live users online in this case. The solutions are as @sridharan.s suggests:
Schedule update downtime and inform your users. OR, your recording thingy-dingy can of course set some state in your app when anyone launches one (obviously, such a state is going to be a list of open recording sessions or some such – and you’d remove them when recording sessions are closed). When you feel like pushing an update, you examine that state. Is it empty? Then nobody is doing a thing you’re going to interrupt. Go ahead an push.
Another non-code solution (which may or may not ever work for you if your app is very popular and busy) is to install Google Analytics and use the Real Time report to see if there are users on your site right now. (There’s a browser plug in for GA as well, which shows the real time report.) Is there only 1 user on the site? If so, that’s you and pushing an update will not be seen by anyone but you.
(These are but two ideas: As with all things web there are myriad solutions but perhaps these ideas point you in the right direction.)
