This was originally part of #2075. Solution may not be trivial(ie. option 3, see below), better not to do it in 2.2.

Comment by Endi S. Dewata [freeipa-devel list]:

For details page, automatically refreshing the page still makes sense to avoid overriding newer data with older information. For example you open a user details page to add an email address, but at the same time somebody else added another email address to same user. When you finally save your changes the other email address will be gone.

I think there are several options:
1. Don't refresh if the page is dirty (i.e. user is editing the page).
2. Refresh unedited fields only.
3. Load the data even though it's being edited, compare with the cached data. If something's changed alert the user. The user can either revert the changes or continue editing.
4. Use addattr/delattr to modify multi-valued attributes.

The chance of this happening is probably small, and the solution won't completely eliminate the risk either, so this is probably lower priority.

For search page, there are 2 things that the page keeps in cache: the primary keys and the visible entry details. Currently when you change page it will refresh both, so periodically refreshing the page may not be that important. However ideally we shouldn't need to refresh the primary keys in all page changes because it could be long and most likely unchanged. In this case it makes sense to refresh the primary keys periodically. Probably separate ticket.