Absinthe subscriptions - do they cache something?

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1

This is not a question. I am just sharing a facet of my experience with Absinthe subscriptions.

Today I was “hackathon”-level coding a new graphQL API with a friend using Phoenix+Absinthe.

I am using subscriptions in Absinthe a lot and I noticed something strange happening.

I would have failing test for subscriptions and I would not know why it was failing. So, i would put IO.inspect in the subscription config and trigger functions to inspect the args.

When i do this, the tests pass!

I have seen this before using Elixir/Phoenix - my tests fail and when I try to observe actual values, they start to pass.

I feels like Schroedinger’s cat - when I observe the values, they actually take a value ( I have seen this happening before with System.env calls).

Does anyone else experience this with Elixir? Maybe it’s a Phoenix thing? I rarely use Elixir without Phoenix.

Sorry if this topic is too vague but I have no strong evidence of the problem (it’s not really a big problem, just a small inconvenience) and I am wondering if anyone else sees this happening sometimes.

also Merry Christmas everyone, I hope nobody is too cold this winter.

2

i just want to confirm this experience.

I wrote a new test for a new subscription.

i ran it once and it failed.
i ran it again after changing NOTHING and it passed.

Elixir caches values somewhere and i wish I could see it

3

Hi @slouchpie, can you post some code that I can use to reproduce what you’re seeing?

4

I think it will be hard to reproduce. I cannot reliably reproduce it. I only see it when i am developing - writing new types/mutations/subscriptions.