Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Quick solution to Ajax caching issue

I got this quick fix solution to Ajax caching issue from the following site. Thought of sharing this.

http://radio.javaranch.com/pascarello/2005/10/21/1129908221072.html

The question: The Ajax request is grabbing the cached page from the previous request, how do I stop this from happening? Well I have seen some fancy approaches by people, but there is one easy solution that works: a random query string value appended to the request.

So how and why does this work. Well it simple terms, when the browser looks at the destination, if it has a match, then it uses the data it has. Now this is great for when you are going to a static website, but since we are looking for new data, it sucks. By appending a random value to our parameters that we are sending back, it forces the browser to say, "Stop the press! We got new info here! Lets go get the data!"