Troubleshooting Caching

MicrobeTrace has had several bugs related to caching over its history. If you're having a problem with MicrobeTrace, there are two likely culprits: the system breaks because of a specific thing about your data, or the cache has somehow screwed up. This is a guide to the latter issue.

Browser Caching

MicrobeTrace is a single-page application (SPA), meaning that as it requires additional resources, it requests them and updates its content without ever refreshing the page. Unfortunately, sometimes browser cache can save old versions of these resources, oblivious to the fact that they no longer work. To fix this issue:

In Chrome

1. Open Chrome
2. Hit Ctrl+Shift+Del (or copy/paste chrome://settings/clearBrowserData into your URL bar)

3. Set the Time Range dropdown to "All time"
4. Uncheck "Browsing History" and "Cookies and other site data" (Be certain you un-check these! If you don't, you'll be signed out of every site you're logged in to. If you are logged in to Chrome, you'll be logged out of every site on every device you've used to log in to Chrome.)
5. Click "Clear Data"
6. Reopen MicrobeTrace. Everything should work now.

In Firefox

1. Open Firefox
2. Hit Ctrl+Shift+Del

3. Set the "Time range to clear" dropdown to "Everything"
4. Uncheck everything except "Cache" and "Offline Website Data"
5. Click "Clear Now"
6. Reopen MicrobeTrace. Everything should work now.

In Internet Explorer

Stop trying to use Internet Explorer. It's a bad, dangerous, unsupported browser.

If this doesn't work:

Service Workers, Application Cache, and other weird stuff

MicrobeTrace achieves near-complete offline functionality by caching itself in your browser. It updates itself every time you're connected to the internet. We do this intentionally to ensure that even if your network goes down, you can still use MicrobeTrace, and you always have the freshest possible version of MicrobeTrace. However, sometimes browsers get confused and fail to update correctly. Here's how to deal with that:

In Chrome

1. Open Chrome, Open MicrobeTrace and hit Ctrl+Shift+I. This will open your Chrome Developer tools.
2. Click on the "Application" Tab. (If your screen is narrow, it may be hidden behind the ">>" in the Devtools tab bar.)
3. Click "Clear storage in the menu on the left.
4. Make sure everything is checked, and then click "Clear Site Data".
5. Click the "x" to close the Developer tools and hit Ctrl+Shift+R to hard-refresh MicrobeTrace. Everything should work now.

In FireFox

1. Open Firefox, Open MicrobeTrace and hit Ctrl+Shift+I. This will open your Developer tools.
2. Click on the "Storage" Tab. (It may be hidden behind the ">>" in the Devtools tab bar.)
3. Click on "Cache Storage", then "https://microbetrace.cdc.gov".
4. Right click on the first entry below "https://microbetrace.cdc.gov", and click "Delete All"
5. Click the "x" to close the Developer tools and hit Ctrl+Shift+R to hard-refresh MicrobeTrace. Everything should work now.

In Internet Explorer

You really never learn, do you?