When you're sure your code is correct, but APEX shows something different...

I already blogged once what you can do when you're looking at one of your bugs and you just don't see it.

Today I had it again... a customer was calling me that something was not behaving as expected. So I went into my development system and had a look at it. Worked like a charm on my system. I login to their system and test it and yes they were right: there was a piece visible that shouldn't be there!

The code was identical... Argh!

It happened to me before, but for an odd reason it always takes me a few minutes to remind myself!

Do you know you can Cache your page in APEX? Well, you can (go to your Page Attributes - Cache). I use it to improve performance. The feature is great, until you change something on the page and forgot it's cached ;-)

It would be nice if the APEX engine detected you changed the page in your development environment (sort of page checksum for the whole page) and verifies this. If the checksum is different it should get the new version, but it doesn't.

You can flush your cache manually by using following procedures in the APEX_UTIL/HTMLDB_UTIL package:

procedure purge_regions_by_app (
  -- Purges all cached regions for a given application.
  --
  p_application in number);

procedure purge_regions_by_name (
  -- Purges all cached regions of a given name for a given application
  -- and page.
  --
  p_application  in number,
  p_page         in number,
  p_region_name  in varchar2);

procedure purge_regions_by_page (
  -- Purges all cached regions for a given application and page.
  --
  p_application  in number,
  p_page         in number);

Caching (APEX 3.0) is a really nice feature, but I wouldn't put it on till you end the development...