Steven Zahm@ Mitch
re: Interesting, as I had not noticed this issue previously. We use a managed WordPress host, so the ‘broken or old’ part is a little disconcerting. I will be passing this along to them for comment.
That statement comes straight from the PHP doc page explaining why a FALSE would be returned.
re: I am experiencing this issue on other sites on the same server. Do I need to make changes there also? or can I just wait for your next release? (or is that a ways out? if so, I’ll need to address).
I’ll very likely push out an update, very minor, this week. If you wish, all you need to do is copy the class.utility.php file from your sandbox to the live sites.
re: It still seems as though existing records that HAVE data (address, phone, etc…) when I open these records to make any edits, ALL of that address data is gone. So if I save (without reentering the address data from scratch), it saves the record with blank data.
This ONLY happens with records that have NOT been (recently) edited. Meaning if I edit a record that had already been messed up, the new edit does retain the data and works properly. (That sounds weird, does that make any sense?)
Connections stores record data in two locations in the db for performance reasons. The first is a cache and the second is the actual db tables. The actual db table will only ever be access when editing and searching, never for display. The display comes from the cache.
Now, that said… three years ago, maybe longer, all the entry data was read/written to from what is now the cache as the tables did not exist. So, one of those updates, along the way included a routine which added the tables and migrated the data from what is now the cache. It seems that update never migrated the data for some reasons for you. The only solution would be to manually trigger that update. Doing that though, the good entries will now have duplicates of the data when editing an entry.
So… yes, what you described make perfect sense.