Portal Caching - Dynamics 365 Online Portal

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Posted on by Steven O'Neill

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Hi guys

Apologies as I know this has been spoken about a few times now but we're having a few issues with Portal caching and cache invalidation.

Biggest issue we have is that the cache remains stale for about 24 hours and anything updated within the CRM directly isn't reflected within the Portal for about this time. Any changes made at the front-end of the Portal is shown almost instantly.

I'm aware that there has been discussions about Web Notification URLs and that this isn't the way to go for Dynamics 365 Online Portal and we should be using Azure Event Hubs but there doesn't appear to be any paperwork readily available to show how this should be done (is there an Event Hub already configured within Azure for your CRM environment and you can go in and tweak this to add the entities we need to be refreshed for example?)

We need to be able to have the web forms updated immediately when we update them (instead of having to restart the Portal which is a sledgehammer to crack a nut) or if we update the data in the CRM directly then we need the Entity Lists updated asap (and this is taking about 24 hours at present which isn't acceptable). Stale data on the front-end after it has been updated in the CRM is a big issue right now.

If anyone has any advice then I'd really appreciate this as we need to get this sorted on a Portal as soon as we can.

Cheers

Steven

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Colin V on at

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Hi Steven, the service bus cache invalidation is setup by default but only certain entities are pre-defined. This isn't a service bus you can configure or touch at all so there is no setup for you to do. If you want additional entities tracked beyond what is pre-defined by the service bus then you need to enable Change Tracking on those entities.

http://crmtipoftheday.com/2016/11/28/some-finesse-in-portal-cache-resets/

The service bus is not perfect so you may still experience things not being properly invalidate. I think the portal team is aware of this and trying to make improvements but I would also encourage you to open a support case so that more visibility is put on the issue.

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Steven O'Neill 575 on at

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Hi Colin

Thanx for the response. Yeah I'd seen this tip before and we do have Change Tracking on the Entity we need the data being pulled in from. In fact, all the entities we use have Change Tracking on (from Content Snippets to Web Form Steps) and nothing that is done directly in Dynamics 365 is published to the Portal in a timely manner. Any updates we make the Content Snippets or Web Forms can take hours to push through to the front-end.

One of the main issues we have is with Entity Lists. The main problem (that we are seeing) is in relation to the Entity Lists we have displayed on the page in question. We have an Entity List that is bringing back some basic info and you can click on links to edit/review the record. If we update Dynamics CRM with some data that should affect the Entity List results and go back to the Entity List and refresh the page then it looks the same as before we made the changes.

However, if we change the sort order (on the Entity List on the Portal page) then the changes we made in Dynamics 365 are reflected within the Entity List. So it would seem that the Entity List is stale at the point of loading...is there a setting in the Entity List that we can set that essentially stops the cache from holding onto it? Or is there some other way we can sort this.

Driving me mad tbh

Cheers

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Colin V on at

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I have also experienced exactly what your describing with entity list so it does seem to be an issue not just limited to your instance. What I can suggest is that you enable the old plugin based invalidation.

You should have a solution called WebNotifications, if you open it, there will be a configuration page to take you through the steps. When creating your web notification URL you will want to use WebNotification.axd instead of Cache.axd. Then add the desired entities in the configuration page so that it registers the plugin steps on those.

I would still log a support case so they are aware of the issues with service bus cache invalidation as this is the future direction for the cache invalidation.

See Patrick's detailed instructions in this thread - community.dynamics.com/.../210500

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Steven O'Neill 575 on at

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Hi Colin

Thanx for this. Yeah I'd seen this mentioned as well (not that thread) but we'd tried the Web Notifications route as well at the weekend and it didn't work...bizarrely it seemed to work last night so potentially some background issues being worked out.

Weird though that he previous threads I'd read on here about this had Patrick stating not to use that route (posts from back in September/October 2016) and then in the one you've mentioned from November 2016 and he's advocating this way...guess it shows they're aware of the issue and needing to use the potential on-premise mechanisms for the online setup at present.

I'll raise a call with MS about the caching issue anyway but fingers crossed it seems to be okay for now using Web Notifcations (but I'll keep monitoring it).

Cheers

Steven

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Hi

I have exactly the same issues. Last week I set up a sandbox CRM instance with a portal. When I change existing web templates, the changes aren't active until I retstart the portal over the 365 Admin center. All mentioned solutions (configure the web notification solution, change tracking) didn't work for me. I have ensured, that all portal related entities have checked "change tracking".

I can't believe, that there isn't an alternative way to restart the portal in the adim center

Kind regards, Oliver

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I was having the same issue. Here is the fix I found.

1. You must be an admin in your portal instance.

2. Go to "portal URL/_services/about"

3. Click the Clear Cache button Under the Tools heading.

4. Refresh your portal website in your browser.

The problem is when you make a change to your website through your CRM interface, it changes schema files and that can take some time to refresh. This is a quick way to force and update from those schema files.

Cheers!

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Colin V on at

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conterio updated instructions are the best to follow now provided you are on v8.3.x and above.

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SamShiles on at

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This doesn't work for me. I'm adding a new page via Portals -> Portal Management -> Create Portal Content and the page is not showing up in any dropsdown (for example editing the primary navigation) or the site map until I restart the portal. Clearing the cache via /_services/about does not work for me.

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JamesLin 51 on at

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We are currently on portal V 8.3.0.215

We are aware of the /_services/about method to invalidate the cache but it's doesn't resolve the problem when the portal is live and the user needs to see data from CRM in real time without lag.

We tried the enabling the Web Notification method as a temporary solution as described by Colin, but we struggled to set it up, it errors when we try to save and publish the selected entity in the Web Notification solution with error message below:

Can't validate the following URLs. Please check that they're correct and try again.

https://myportal.microsoftcrmportals.com/WebNotification.axd

We have tried restarting the portal and turning it off then on, no luck so far, anyone else come across this when configuration web notification?

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JamesLin 51 on at

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We are currently on portal V 8.3.0.215

we are aware of the /_services/about method to invalidate the cache but it's doesn't resolve the problem when the portal is live and the user needs to see data from CRM in real time without lag.

we tried the enabling the Web Notification method as a temporary solution as described by Colin, but we struggled to set it up, it errors when we try to save and publish the selected entity in the Web Notification solution with error message below:

Can't validate the following URLs. Please check that they're correct and try again.

myportal.microsoftcrmportals.com/WebNotification.axd

We have tried restarting the portal and turning it off then on, no luck so far, anyone else come across this when configuration web notification?

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