Any way to force browsers to load newer page?

[Greg9497]

Here's the problem:

The site for my company has just updated a page to remove "sensitive" items from it for a client. People at the client's site surf to the page and see the old one in their cache, not the new one on our server, and do not seem to be able to grasp the concept of browsers caching web pages and the fact that the page only exists on their own hard drives.

How can either our web page or our Apache web server force someone's browser to view the new page and not the old cached one? <META> tags seem to be one answer, though not a very good one. Another server-side solution seems to be redirection, though I dunno if it would introduce a bug to have someone redirected to a new version of the same page.

Any input would be wildly appreciated. I know little about hosting a site, but since I'm the "IT guy" here this falls to me, and the page is totally offline until I can fix it.

 

[danomac]

One option may be to send http headers that disable the cache.

As far as implementation-wise, I generally use php, and to do that I use:

<?php
header("Cache-control: no-cache");
?>

You may want to check out the other scripting forums here on tek-tips. I myself am unaware how to send these types of headers globally through apache.

D

 

[Einstein47]

What version of Apache?

Do you have control of the httpd.conf file or do you use .htaccess files?

Look at this for reference:

http://www.mnot.net/cache_docs/

I'm not an expert on caching, but I am kind of in the same boat and I need more info myself. Hope my initial research can help point you in the right direction.

Einstein47
(Some people make things happen. Some people watch things happen. Some people wonder what happened. - Unknown)