Automatic Page Content Expiration

[Jason Kendall]

I've noticed that my ASP.Net projects suffer from being cached locally
when my users' broswers are set to automatically check for newer
pages. Folks will go through the process of 'adding' an item to
whatever part of the application they're interacting with and they
won't see the new record unless they close the browser or do a
CTRL-Refresh or wait some indeterminate amount of time.

I set the server to expire content immediately and encountered several
errors mostly associated with sending files to the client. I set the
server to expire content after 1 minute and the problem persists,
obviously, for a minute.

When I set the browsers to always check for a new page, the problem
goes away.

How do most people solve this problem?

 

[Guest]

I think expiring content "immediately" would probably be the best resolution.
This ensures current content.

In order to handle the "file" problem, put files in a separate directory on
the web server which has the content set to expire after 1 minute. This is
what I had to do to resolve this problem with Word or Acrtobat documents. I
think immediate expiration fails for these files because of an additional
round-trip to the server that the Word or Adobe components require to
download them.

Hope this helps...

 

[Jason Kendall]

Well, that's a creative solution!

I'll have to investigate to see how easy that'll be to implement for
my site structure, but that might just be the ticket.

Are most people solving the problem this same way? I happen to work
on an Intranet and have control over browser settings, but I'd prefer
to keep things as 'default' as possible on the client.