Question

I’m working on an ASP.NET MVC website and there is a problem that occurs at random (and only on one server it seems) whereby the user navigates to an edit page which contains a few text fields and a submit button, changes some valid data in one of the fields and clicks the submit button but sometimes instead of the data saving and returning the user to the view details page (as it’s supposed to), the edit page is displayed again and it saves only after clicking the submit button a few more times again.

Given the data being entered into the textboxes is valid, and given this problem cannot be reproduced on the other servers or local development copy of the website, what possible causes could there be for this? Could it be something related to resources on the server?

How would you go about investigating this in order to find out what’s causing this?

Note; it’s not possible to debug the code because it’s on another server. I can use the same database but the problem still cannot be reproduced.

Answer 1

Here are the steps I would recommend:

1. Set a breakpoint in the corresponding controller, right at the top of the logic, and see what is being passed to the controller. Then, follow the logic down to see where it is getting kicked out.
2. Open your browsers debugger and view the network traffic. See exactly what you are sending to your controller. This might shed some light on the reason(s) for the failed update.