Image scales wrongly regenerating

Plone

I had a problem with my Frankenstein stack of Plone 4 with various bits (core libraries) upgraded on it. Here’s a description of my bug:

When I upload an image and try to use it in a Volto block that referenced its image scales download url (such as @@images/<random-uuid4>.jpg) the image URL didn’t work, it resulted in 404 error. When I reindexed the image in the catalog, then it worked. Now, the funky part is that I could reproduce the problem not only on my “doomed” Plone 4 stack, but also in the modern Plone 6 stack that we use for our main customer.

I traced the problem to the fact that the context content was changing its _p_mtime which caused its scales to be regenerated, due to this check in plone.scale

I solved my particular problem by monkey-patching the _modified_since function and setting its default offset keyword argument to be 3 seconds. I think the latest plone.scale code has a more stable “algorithm” to generate the scale uids, but the old code that I’m using always generates a random uuid4 uid, which aggravates the problem.

So, the main take-away is: if for some reason your code causes the _p_mtime of your persistent objects to change during the same transaction, and you have code that reads the scales information, those scales get regenerated. And if the scale uids change, I don’t think they’re even being reindexed.