CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi Marty,

I'm running 3.1.3 on Drupal and just double-checked: "Recent Items" is updating properly for the tested user, who does not have the "Administer CiviCRM" permission.

Could be another module interfering.  Have you tried testing this with other modules turned off?

 -Allen

I discovered that the issue is related to Drupal block caching and not CiviCRM permissions. My user with Administer CiviCRM permission is Drupal user 1, and Recent Items display properly because Drupal does not cache blocks for user 1. The Recent Items block does not update properly for my user without Administer CiviCRM permission because Drupal is fetching a stale copy of the block from the cache.  The Drupal hook function civicrm_block() is never called to create updated versions of the Recent Items block for users other than user 1.

My solution for now was to change the 'cache' field in the Drupal 'blocks' table for the Recent Items block from BLOCK_CACHE_GLOBAL (0x0008) to BLOCK_NO_CACHE (-1).  Recent Items update properly for all users with this change.

If I understand correctly, all of the CiviCRM blocks are registered in Drupal with BLOCK_CACHE_GLOBAL (see CRM/Core/Block.php).  Should we open an issue to change the default caching to BLOCK_NO_CACHE?

Do you know if the Drupal block cache is enabled on the sandbox site?  I would expect to see the same problems there if it is.

Thanks!

Hey,

I left "CiviCRM Create New Record", "CiviCRM Quick Add" and "CiviCRM Full-text Search" as cached blocks, and changed all the rest to be BLOCK_NO_CACHE. Those three are basically small forms that do not change due to setting/data changes, while the rest of blocks might.

Thx,
m