Staying Up To Date

Alpha runs as a single-page app: once a tab is open it keeps running the version it started with, even after we ship a new one. A tab left open for days or weeks therefore keeps using old code against an up-to-date server.

That is not only about missing new features. Documents such as estimates and invoices are rendered in your browser, so an old tab can produce an old calculation; two people downloading the same estimate can end up with different totals, and the one on the stale tab is the wrong one.

The update banner

When a newer version of Alpha has been deployed, a blue banner appears at the top of the screen:

Er draait een nieuwere versie van Alpha. Herlaad om die te gebruiken. (A newer version of Alpha is running. Reload to use it.)

Click Nu herladen / Reload now and the page reloads onto the current version.

Alpha checks for this when you open a tab, every fifteen minutes, and whenever you return to a tab that was in the background; the last one is what catches tabs left open overnight.

What Alpha will not do

• It never reloads by itself. A reload would discard anything you are halfway through typing, so the moment is always yours to pick.
• The banner cannot be dismissed. Every other banner in Alpha is informational; this one means the screen you are looking at may be out of date, and one click resolves it.

If you suspect you are on an old version

If a screen or a downloaded PDF looks wrong (especially if a colleague sees something different for the same record), force a reload before reporting it:

• macOS: Cmd + Shift + R
• Windows / Linux: Ctrl + Shift + R

If that resolves the difference, the tab was running an older version of Alpha.