spontaneous configurations?

Chester –

This popped up a while back, but at the time I wasn’t sure I hadn’t done something wrong. It seemed to disappear for a while, but it’s returned with a vengeance. NOTE: Once again, I am NOT testing on a clean server, but I can if necessary.

In brief, over time my Airpress settings become filled with bogus configurations. For instance, at the moment I have one valid Airtable Connection defined, a test connection I just now created to see if defining new connections, Virtual Posts, or Virtual Fields is logged (no, but maybe it should be) — and 14 empty connections, each labeled “New Configuration.” Internally, each is only partially defined; it’s as if I’d clicked the “+” 14 times, which I’m pretty sure I didn’t do.

Something similar happened with my Virtual Posts, in that I ended up with numerous empty Virtual Post configurations.

Since the empty New Configurations are just that — empty — they don’t seem to threaten Airtable or WordPress integrity, and you can simply step through them and delete. Probably the biggest danger they pose is one I inadvertently discovered the first time this issue popped up: After each configuration is deleted, WordPress returns to the first configuration defined — which is typically a valid configuration. If you’re expecting, instead, that after deleting the last configuration in the list you’ll be returned to the *new* last configuration (that is, what was previously the next-to-last one), it’s all too easy to click “Delete this configuration” prematurely and wipe out a working definition.

When do these empty configs appear? Beats me. I had hoped I might suss it out from the debug logs, but I’ve yet to determine a reliable sequence of logged entries that might indicate when a new Connection, VP, or VP configuration has been entered. (The lack of timestamps in the logfile for non-error conditions also complicates matters.) Finally, I’ve done so much goofy, um, stuff over the past few weeks as I’ve tried to reawaken the lately unused php (+/- 10 years) and WordPress (+/- 18 months) lobes of my brain, it’s difficult to separate the bonehead clutter from the potentially meaningful info. (I plan to zero-out the log when I quit for the night to make things a little easier to decipher going forward.)

However, I *will* say there seem to be more calls to “Simulated Virtual Post Collection” than I would have expected — including some that don’t appear to have been triggered by the definition of a new VP configuration.

Oh, and this is definitely a problem: I just had the following appear in my logfile:

200     0       0.56    outfit?filterByFormula=OR({Name} = "Burgers")
200     0       0.4     outfit?filterByFormula=OR({Name} = "Burgers")
DELAYED QUERY : /outfit : 2ee3a270daa364fa0f4e86cd004f80b8      outfit?filterByFormula=OR({Name} = "Burgers")

Obviously, that comes from the tests I had run against the Restaurant Field Guide base when I was trying to reproduce your code examples. However, currently there are no Airpress Connections or VP or VF configurations defined for that base, so Airpress must be dredging that up from incompletely deleted definitions in the WordPress database. (For that matter, last I checked, none of the tables in the Field Guide base contained an “outfit” column.)

IN any case, if there’s anything I can do to help track down these issues or isolate them to some mismatch between plugins, please let me know!

Thanks,
Maz