Vaadin Support resolves a humongous variety of different tasks and issues all the time. It is actually fascinating to see all the different Vaadin projects our customers are working on and what they are struggling with. However, every now and then some issues surface that kind of repeat themselves. The root cause is the same. So I thought I’ll share some of the most recent ones, as someone might be struggling with these right now.
Remember to clean up
Are you using Threads? Leaking memory, GC can’t remove everything? If this sounds familiar you might be facing one of our long term acquaintances at Vaadin Support. While using custom Threads it is really easy to lock resources within Vaadin RPC when the connection gets lost e.g. someone simply closes the browser. So if you use Threads also make sure to use VaadinService.addServiceDestroyListener(). This method is connected to Servlet.destroy() and exists exactly for cleaning up resources you are holding. Use it.
These are not the X/Y coordinates I’m looking for
Vaadin 7.6 introduced an enhanced support for context menus and the ContextMenu Add-on via ContextClickEvent. However, we received a bunch of questions that some of the Vaadin Charts chart types didn’t return a correct X/Y coordinate when clicked, thus opening a context menu to a wrong place. Investigation showed that this was actually a bug in Vaadin Charts and Vaadin Support team made a fix for this. All the support customers got a patch immediately and the rest of you will get the fix within maintenance releases. Keep your Vaadin Charts up to date.
Upgrading to Vaadin 7.6, getting errors
After our support customers started upgrading to Vaadin 7.6 we noticed two issues that had a similar trend. Building a project started failing either because of the widgetset didn’t compile or the Sass theme didn’t compile. If your widgetset doesn’t compile, start going through your add-ons. We noticed that in some cases an add-on isn’t compatible with Vaadin 7.6. So if you do find a broken add-on, inform the author as a good community member would, right? For theming, the Sass compiler got more strict in 7.6. If your theme compilations started to fail it actually means that your theme is somehow broken or not following the Sass rules etc. Review your theme and fix all findings, this makes sure your theme is working as you originally intended.
In addition to these recurring issues we of course resolved a mountain of specific and individual topics for our customers. But when I notice some recurring trends or frequently asked things I’ll share them with all of you. In the meantime please take a look what our support is all about. Maybe we could help you too.