Throughout the Scope 5 application, there are various types of data 'rollups'. These include various charts, reports and the statistics 'widget' that is ever-present in the top right corner of each page. Some of these roll-ups can take a fair amount of processing effort and time to generate. Because of this, certain data rollups may be generated infrequently and then 'cached' for some amount of time.
'Cached' means that a copy of the rolled up data is stored in the application so that users can view it immediately on request, rather than having to wait for it to be generated. The downside of caching is that cached data rollups may be 'stale' in the sense that they do not necessarily reflect the latest data in the system. In the case of most charts and reports, an 'Update Data' link is provided so that users can 'flush' the cache and cause the rollup to be recalculated such that it does reflect the latest data.
In general, this kind of caching can lead to 'data coherence' problems - rollups that are not necessarily 100% consistent with each other at all times. To help our users understand the data coherence issues in Scope 5, we've put together the following table:
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