1320843 - JSON data is stale for translations

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(developer.mozilla.org Graveyard :: API, defect, P3)

Description

[John Whitlock [:jwhitlock]]

What did you do?
================
While scraping the site to construct a sample database, I found several instances where the $json API data had not been updated for at least 9 months, as indicated by the missing UUID parameter added in February 2016.

What happened?
==============
JSON representing the state from nine or more months ago was returned.

What should have happened?
==========================
The JSON should reflect recent changes like new alternate translations.

Is there anything else we should know?
======================================
The JSON is cached in the database in the Document record, and is updated when a new revision is created.  Stale translations are particularly susceptible to this problem. The JSON takes a long time to generate, so some caching may be needed.

However, other methods could be used that do not involve a database write due to a GET in some situations. A cacheback task could automatically regenerate the JSON in the background periodically, and invalidate the cache in more situations, such as the adding of an alternate translation.

Comment 1

[John Whitlock [:jwhitlock]]

This also impacts the Doc Status pages for translations, as reported in https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/recent-changes-for-caching-policy-doc-status-pages-management/34858

Comment 2

[BMO Automation]

MDN Web Docs' bug reporting has now moved to GitHub. From now on, please file content bugs at https://github.com/mdn/sprints/issues/ and platform bugs at https://github.com/mdn/kuma/issues/.