Browser displays old files - cache problem?

[innmedia]

Hi,

We have web pages with links to Word documents and PDF files. Weekly these documnents and files are updated. The content is new, but the file names are the same - which allows the links in the web pages to remain as is.

However, clicking on a link will often bring up an old copy of a file, even though the old copy no longer exists. It is not due to the cache settings of the browser. There seems to be a cache somehow connected with the server.

I am not the network administrator, but am one of the web designers. The network admin folks are not responsive to the problem, so I am trying to help by providing some feedback.

Does anyone know of this problem and/or have any suggestions?

Thanks,

Ken B

 

[webmaster999]

They could have a proxy server setup that is caching all pages passed through it. If this is the case, then they will have a REAL HARD time getting it to not cache a single page or two (or 20, etc).

Matt A+, MCP, MCP+I, MCSE Windows NT 4.0, MCSE Windows 2000 Early Achiever with Security Emphasis

 

[rewebb]

You can enable content-expiration in IIS (you don't say which version of IIS you're using) so that documents are not cached inappropriatley. Under the HHTP headers tab in MMC yo can select content-expiration for either a whole site, folder of file. You can set files to expire on a particular time/date, or to expire after a set number of days/hours/minutes or you can set documents to expire immediately.

However, we experienced lots of very odd problems when we set one of our intranet servers to expire all content immediately and we subsequently disabled content-expiration.

Beware that enabling content-expiration will have a negative effect on browser performace as fewer (or no) documents will be stored in the browser (or proxy server) cache.

There is another option, of course, for ASP's as you can force expiry with "response.expires=". You can achieve a similar result woth CGI apps using the "pragma no-cache" HTTP header. (You'll have to check the syntax for this - sorry)