Aggressive JavaScript caching

Asked 2008-09-10T15:46:58.877

I've run into a problem where I make changes to a few JavaScript files that are referenced in an HTML file, but the browser doesn't see the changes. It holds onto the copy cached in the browser, even though the web server has a newer version.

Not until I force the browser to clear the cache do I see the changes.

Is this a web-server configuration? Do I need to set my JavaScript files to never cache? I've seen some interesting techniques in the Google Web Toolkit where they actually create a new JavaScript file name any time an update is made. I believe this is to prevent proxies and browsers from keeping old versions of the JavaScript files with the same names.

Is there a list of best practices somewhere?

javascript caching

Edit Report

2 Answers

I've written a blog post about how we overcame this problem here:

Avoiding JavaScript and CSS Stylesheet Caching Problems in ASP.NET

Basically, during development you can add a random number to a query string after the filename of your CSS file. When you do a release build, the code switches to using your assembly's revision number instead. This means that in your production environment, your clients can cache the stylesheet, but whenever you release a new version of the site they'll be forced to re-load the file.

answered 2009-07-30T20:00:10.353

is your webserver sending the right headers to tell the browser it has a new version? I've also added the date to the querystring before. ie myscripts.js?date=4/14/2008 12:45:03 (only the date would be encoded)

answered 2008-09-10T15:51:28.317

Aggressive JavaScript caching

2 Answers

Your Answer