My view doesn't work anymore

If you're reading this article, then at some point, for some unknown reason, one or more of your views have stopped working.  Here are some common phrases we hear related to this:

• I haven't done anything and the view won't load anymore.
• I upgraded and now I can't add a product to the cart.
• There are a bunch of JavaScript errors on the product page.
• I tried to go to checkout and the cart won't let me.

Not a Cause

NO LONGER RELEVANT PAST VERSION 3.0:  Your site does not require a license to be applied and/or activated in order for a customer-facing view to be displayed.  Please see our documentation on staging license activation to see what the trial mode affects.

Possible Causes

Our customer-facing views are tested very thoroughly prior to any release, so while we'll end up making a mistake from time to time (we're only human), it's highly unlikely that a view just stopped working, even after an upgrade.  In nearly all cases, issues with customer-facing views are resolved by updating your custom viewset.

Cascading Errors

Sometimes another process on your site might be causing an error to occur, and even a seemingly innocent update to your viewset might be causing an error.  In either case, you should review the errors in your event viewer to see if any of them might help you identify the cause of your view(s) not working.  

AJAX and/or JavaScript Issues

It's very common for an AJAX or other client-side issues to be introduced that impact the ability for your site views to render.  In fact, adding a third party module to the page, or using a new/updated version of a theme on the page could easily break something.  This is especially true if your theme is being updated by other people.  

In order to troubleshoot things like this, you should use the inspection tools in your web browser, often called "web developer tools."  In some cases, you may need to use a more powerful tool such as Fiddler, to troubleshoot a URL redirection that may or may not be occurring.  

Merge Viewset Changes

You might have recently upgraded Hotcakes - which is great.  However, one thing that's easy to miss in the upgrade process is checking to see if there are any updates that might be relevant to you, and merging them into your custom viewset.  Our documentation about what you should do when upgrading addresses this and other possible issues.

Check the Default Viewset

Please know that we thoroughly test each and every release.  When it comes to the views that customers interact with, we test those views and use cases more thoroughly than any other.  If your product, cart, or checkout isn't loading at all, it's not likely that this is an out-of-the-box bug.  You really should compare what you're experiencing to the _default viewset.

Switch your store to use the _default viewset in the administration area, and then test your findings again.  It's likely that you'll find the issue isn't occurring in the _default viewset.  If this is true, then you need to troubleshoot your viewset to isolate the possible cause of the issue.