Webflow caches by API

Developers Developer APIs
1

Hi everyone,

I’m running into a problem that I just can’t seem to solve… and from what I can tell, it hasn’t been answered anywhere yet.

To give you some context: I’m using n8n to retrieve job offers via salesforces and webflow API. My setup is organized around two automations:

  1. One automation fetches the offers, modifies them, and creates them.
  2. The second automation handles deletion of offers, but with a twist – instead of fully deleting them, it just unpublishes them, which moves them to “draft” status.

To keep my collection clean, I wanted to add another automation that runs once a day to permanently delete all offers in “draft” status.

Here’s the problem: in some cases, offers that have been unpublished get re-published. And as some of you might guess… when recreating the offer, the URL is considered as already existing in the system – a caching issue! The worst part is, even after manually publishing the site (or publishing it via the API), it still considers the URL as taken. So I’m stuck!

Does anyone have any idea how to solve this issue?

Question for the Webflow team: Are there any plans to provide solutions for these caching issues? For example, the ability to manually clear the cache or trigger a cache clear via API without publishing the entire site?

Right now, the only workaround I have is to stop deleting offers completely and just leave them as drafts, which over time will fill up the database with drafts (and that’s really not ideal).

Thanks in advance for your time and any help you can offer!

1 Like
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Hi @Baptiste_pro - sorry you’re running into CMS issues for publishing! Just so I have some further context on your workflow, could you clarify some of these details below?

  1. When you say your automation “unpublishes” offers(CMS items), can you share which API you’re using here? Is it the Unpublish Single Live Collection Item API?
  2. For the scenarios where your CMS Item has been unpublished and then re-published, are you referring to items where you’ve permanently deleted them from your CMS Collection, and then added new items with the same slug that you try to publish?
  3. Do you have any errors in API responses or screenshots that reflect the issue you describe of Webflow seeing that the “URL” is considered as already existing?

Appreciate your help in gathering these details in advance!