dev/2.0 default theme front carousel intermittently failing?

nobody

hello, after setting up pawtucket2 from the dev/2.0 branch in conjunction with a providence dev/2.0 install with a variety of objects and object representations, the default theme's front carousel is failing to load random images every 1 out of 3 refreshes or so. every 2 out of 3 page does seem to load a variety of seemingly random primary representations as expected.

the most consistent 'failure' ends up with only the primary representations for the first four ca.objects by idno being displayed, the carousel is blank to the right of these images. this happens fairly consistently. other 'failures' end up with 1-5 random object primary representations showing up, but the rest of the carousel is again blank.

representations seem to be loading without an issue in providence. if it's relevant '__CA_CACHE_BACKEND__', 'file'

looking back at a test install of the develop branch from early this year a similar issue occurs, however it seem to happen less frequently (1/10 reloads) and a a larger set of the first ca.objects by idno shows up - 8 or so.

wasn't sure if this is necessarily an issue to report on github or if it's a botched setup/config. wasn't sure where to start testing/digging. thanks as always.

nobody

still trying to wrap my ahead around this problem. i tried going back to an earlier version of pawtucket (2.0.4) without any improvement. also saw the last commit date for featured_set_slideshow_html.php in https://github.com/collectiveaccess/pawtucket2/tree/master/themes/default/views/Front was 6 years ago so thinking this probably isn't a pawtucket issue.

i've also tried running caUtils clear-caches and clearing browser caches without any apparent change in behavior.

if it helps some relevant versions are:
Providence git branch dev/2.0, last commit 7c8d3fd1caeb702c311092d031d9f053e3900905, date pulled Sun Nov 23 20:42:15 2025
PHP 8.3.28
mysql Ver 15.1 Distrib 10.11.11-MariaDB

monica

nobody We workshopped this issue in the support chat room.
Discovered the issue was a compounding one.

The random generation of the front page slide show takes the max object_id and returns a random object_id from that. It then only returns objects that are less than or equal to this object_id. If the random number returned is lower than the lowest object_id in the system, it always returns the lowest object id in the system as the first record, so more often than not the same first few records are returned.
The query it uses to get the objects, checks if a representation is related to the object. However if an object has multiple representations per object, then the same object is returned many times.
In this particular case, there were a lot of deleted representations in the system, which compounded issue #2 with sometimes 80+ repeated objects (with more than one primary representation in some cases).

I suggested to @nobody to purge his deleted representations to remove them from the equation. I think this alone probably would have fixed the issue.
But also added to the query to limit the returned objects to only those with primary reps (He is currently testing this solution to ensure it doesn't cause any other issues).

However on reflection, I believe the better options might be to add a 'DISTINCT' to the query or a 'GROUP BY' to the query.

A github issue has been made to keep track of this: https://github.com/collectiveaccess/pawtucket2/issues/164

nobody

many many thanks for the assistance. caUtils purge-deleted completed successfully and the new query seems to be working well after some further testing today.