Sometimes when loading the the theme configuration hirearchy, if a theme configuration is missing for the surveyGroup, the woraround creates chaos.

I understand that getInstanceFromSurveyGroup should return an instance of the configuration associated with a survey group, while getInstanceFromTemplateName should return a “generic” instance.

When there is no specific configuration for a surveygroup, the code takes what getInstanceFromTemplateName returns (a general instance for the template) and modifies the instance, which is cached.

By not making a clone, what it ends up doing is modifying the cached instance, modifying not only for the surveygroup (as intended) but for the instance for the template.

So, when you call getInstanceFromTemplateName again, it returns something that is not what is supposed to be returned.