Separate the homepage categories API from the AOTD and Banners

[GeopJr]

Recently I had an issue where the 'updated' category API response was cached but the others weren't. That led to the AOTD being the previous day's and the other categories having that day's.

Would it possible to separate them into two endpoints? One for the categories and another for the banner / AOTD?

edit: Actually if all en.json?category=<category> return all other categories as well, why are they separate endpoints to begin with, instead of just en.json?

[razzeee]

They are already separate? I'm not sure what you're calling - I guess you're not actually using the real backend? https://flathub.org/api/v2/docs

Keep in mind, that we don't keep the api stable and don't give gurantees

[GeopJr]

I'm talking about flathub.org. The problem I encountered was that

en.json?category=new was cached in my browser and had the previous day's AOTD, while the other tabs had the current day's.

So switching between Trending, Popular, New, Updated showed different AOTD.

What I'm suggesting is completely decoupling AOTD from en.json or not GETing a separate en.json for each category (since they all have the same data as far as I can tell). That way browsers won't have 4 different cached versions.

Not sure if I'm misinterpreting things, but the AOTD became the same among all categories only after I cleared my cache completely.

[razzeee]

In general, we need stuff to be cached. What you're seeing is also an automatic mechanism, caches die after some amount of time on the server side and will then get regenerated with the next request hitting them for that language.

We don't configure at all what en.json does, that's all automatic.

[GeopJr]

I'm doing a terrible job at describing it and probably misunderstanding how it works, it's not that important or serious but let me try one more time:

This is an edited recording to showcase what I experienced. The 'New' category's en.json was cached in my browser with the previous day's AOTD while the other categories weren't. That caused flathub to show different AOTD based on the current category

Screencast.From.2024-12-22.22-10-07.mp4

What I'm suggesting is either:

1. Separating the AOTD and banners from the categories. So e.g. /aotd.json gets cached separately from /en.json and its categories. That way the cache mishap like in the recording above wouldn't happen.
2. Or as noted by my edit, probably get rid of the separate per category en.json

There are 5 different endpoints that get cached individually but return the same data. en.json, en.json?category=trending, en.json?category=popular, en.json?category=new, en.json?category=updated. My initial issue was caused by that I assume, en.json?category=new had an older cache than the other en.jsons and therefore an older AOTD.

Getting rid of the separate en.jsons would also help in bandwidth as browsers would only request and cache en.json instead of 5 different ones (that return the exact same data)

[GeopJr]

I think this is a similar issue vercel/next.js#27638

edit: from what I gathered, it's not possible to make it ignore query params on getStaticProps, so each ?cageory= is not treated as a different page?

[GeopJr]

Had this happen again today, the AOTD was OBS and it only updated to GNOME Extensions after clicking the 'New' tab