How to ensure users see latest version and not a cached version?
Jun 02, 2015
Will someone assist me in developing a workflow to make sure my users see the latest revision of a project and not a cached version on their local computer?
How do I beta test a project with them? I want to email a single url that remains constant throughout the development cycle. What I am finding is that after I make revisions and upload a revised project, my users continue to see the old version. I understand clearing the local cache solves this, but it isn't practical for me. I often ask a group of administrators to explore the project to get feedback. To try and talk them through clearing their browser cache with different OSes and browsers, is just not good use of their time (nor will they have the patience for it). Users also bookmark the link I send them, so creating a new url each time is problematic since I can never be sure how they are accessing the project.
I'm hoping someone has figured out a work around. Any advice? Thanks.
6 Replies
Good question! It depends on the browser. Do your users always use a single browser? This page gives some simple suggestions:
http://wiki.scratch.mit.edu/wiki/Hard_Refresh
but I've heard Ctrl + F5 is not the silver bullet for Internet Explorer:
http://superuser.com/questions/81182/how-to-force-internet-explorer-ie-to-really-reload-the-page
Thanks for the reply. Multiple browsers and multiple platforms (K-12 school district).
I'm really looking for a design that puts the responsibility on me and frees the end user from having to take any action.
This might work, but you'll probably need access to the settings on the web server where your content is hosted:
http://stackoverflow.com/a/19864589
Great idea. I'll pursue this. Your post led me to this snippet of code that I will try to add to Storyline's output. You could be on to something. Thanks.
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>---</TITLE>
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Pragma" CONTENT="no-cache">
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Expires" CONTENT="-1">
</HEAD>
<BODY>
Here's a more in depth discussion: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/49547/making-sure-a-web-page-is-not-cached-across-all-browsers
One problem I think you might still run into is that altering this at an individual HTML page level (instead of the server level) may not affect the caching of individual SWF files. But I am curious to hear if this works!
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