Inconvenient Caching Issue with Microsoft Lists

Recently, one of my clients pinged me because she wasn’t seeing any items in a list she knew had many items in it. She’s used the list many times in the past and she hadn’t changed any of the view settings.

I did all the usual stuff:

• Checked permissions on the site: She was a Site Owner, as we both thought.
• Looked for broken inheritance on permissions – unlikely to be the problem, since she was a Site Owner.
• Restarting the browser
• Rebooting the machine
• A bunch of random stuff

I could see all the items in the list, as could a few others.

It seemed like such a simple thing, but nothing in my normal arsenal was solving the problem, so I turned to Bing.

I quickly found this post on the Tech Community. A bunch of folks have had the same problem, so the thread was pretty long: SharePoint Caching Problems with Lists – Microsoft Community Hub.

There were some…interesting…solutions there, but the winner is simple:

• Navigate to List Settings, then Advanced Settings
• Scroll down to Offline Client Availability – Odds are it will be set to Yes, so change it to No and save.

Go back to the list and you should see the items again. If you’d like to (and I’d suggest you do), go back in and set Offline Client Availability to Yes again.

My theory is something happened to the caching for the list.

Guess what? The first post in the thread above was just about the same time offline mode rolled out for Microsoft Lists: Microsoft Lists gets ‘supercharged’ performance and offline support | Windows Central. If you didn’t know this ever happened, then it’s working exactly the way it’s supposed to work. If you lose Internet connectivity for a short time, you can continue working and the changes sync when you’re connected again. Heck, take your laptop to a desert island for a week and work on your list and your changes should sync when you plug in again.

When I’ve built solutions which rely on caching in the past, I’ve usually hidden a “cache buster” button somewhere in them. Caching sometimes goes sideways on you, no matter how good your code is. The “cache buster” button here was an advanced setting few people would even think of, much less know about. It would be great if there were some indication on the screen somewhere that maybe something is awry, but no such luck.

Leaving this here for anyone who might be as frustrated as I was, maybe even future me.