Hi

I have a method in my page class which we can call test. If it returns a value, it seems to be only called once, regardless of how many $test are in the .ss file.

e.g.

If I have a page with 5 lots of $test <br> in:

public function test()
{
    print "test printing";
    return "test";
}

Will return 1 Test printing and 5 tests

public function test()
{
    print "Test printing";
}

Will return 5 "Test printing"

If the function returns a value, why does it only get called once? Is there any way I can prevent this? I would like the function to return a different value with each call as it cycles over a list.

Thanks.

Edit: The problem appears to be this "feature" https://docs.silverstripe.org/en/3.2/developer_guides/templates/caching/

Yep. This is caching. To avoid this, you could add parameters to invalidate the caching.

public function test($templateCacheKey = null) {
	return rand(1, 10);
}

$test(1)
$test(2)
$test(3)

Thanks for your reply Devlin. I literally just solved it as you posted :)

Your solution wouldn't work in my case as I don't want to have to remember what the last number I used was. I'm using it to rotate between static content servers.

It would appear that if you return an object it doesn't get cached. So I just returned the instance of my singleton class and then added the function XML_val (which is required of you want to use the dot notation in the .ss file) and Robert's your mothers brother.

For those out there having a similar problem, my code is below.

.ss file

<img src="$staticSites().nextServer()/themes/default/img1.png">
<img src="$staticSites().nextServer()/themes/default/img2.png">
<img src="$staticSites().nextServer()/themes/default/img3.png">

My static server class

<?php
    final class StaticServers {
        private $servers = array();
        private static $inst = null;
        private $pos = 0;

        public static function instance()
        {
            if ( self::$inst === null ) self::$inst = new StaticServers();
            return self::$inst;
        }

        public function nextServer()
        {
            return $this->servers[ $this->nextPos() ];
        }

        public function XML_val( $field, $arguments = null, $cache = false )
        {
            switch( $field )
            {
                case "nextServer":
                    return $this->nextServer();
                    break;
            }

        }

        private function nextPos()
        {
            $currentPos = $this->pos;
            $this->pos = $this->pos < sizeof( $this->servers ) - 1 ? $this->pos + 1 : 0;
            return $currentPos;
        }

        private function __construct()
        {
            // TODO: Pull these from the database
            $this->servers = array(
                'static01.mySite.co.uk',
                'static02.mySite.co.uk',
                'static03.mySite.co.uk',
                'static04.mySite.co.uk',
                'static05.mySite.co.uk'
            );
        }
    }

And in my Page_Controller class

public function staticSites()
{
    $inst = StaticServers::instance();
    return $inst;
}

Edit: I then added an override for the content so I could put ##static## in the html through the CMS and it would be replaced with the static servers.

public function Content()
{
    return preg_replace_callback(
        '/##STATIC##/siU',
        'self::nextServer',
        $this->Content
    );
}

public function nextServer($matches)
{
    return StaticServers::instance()->nextServer();
}