Page not refreshing for specific user

[MarcLodge]

Hi All,
At my son's school they have a website that has a home page with frames. One of the frames runs a piece of javascript that displays a scrolling news list that stops scrolling if you hover, and selects the news item if you click. The data for the news list and items are held elsewhere and not embedded in the frame.

The headmaster has the ability to update the news list and items by an automated FTP process.

The problem is that for the headmaster only, he does not always get the updated information. Everybody else does, but on the specific machine that performs the update, he may have to wait an hour or two or even a day or two.

He is using (as everybody else in the school is) IE6, with the standard default refresh setting of 'check for newer versions of stored pages - automatically'. I have asked him to change this to 'Every visit to the page' and am waiting to see if this makes any difference, but have a feeling it may not, as the actual page being displayed has not changed, just the source data for the Javascript.

Will Windows XP/IE6 recognise this as a newer version of the page or is it somehow being fooled?

Also can anybody come up with a reason why this is only happening on the machine that is performing the upload, and what can be done to fix it.

Many thanks in advance for your help.

Marc

 

[BillyRayPreachersSon]

How is the data retrived? If using JS/Ajax, then I'd post in the JS forum (forum216) about how to add cache-busting parameters to the feed.

The "automatic" setting you mention is really bad - about as useful as a chocolate teapot.

Hope this helps,
Dan

Coedit Limited - Delivering standards compliant, accessible web solutions

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[MarcLodge]

Dan,

I don't know enough to be able to say how the data is retrieved. The page, lifted out of the frame, can be found at

http://www.amherst.kent.sch.uk/base/homepage.htm

and the source can be viewed.

It's not my website I hasten to add, I just happen to know the headmaster very well, who has asked me the question. I'm being very careful to not tread on the webmaster toes!

Marc

 

[Foamcow]

Is he connecting to the page via a proxy server of any kind?

<honk>*:O)</honk>
Foamcow Heavy Industries - Web site design in Cheltenham and Gloucester
Ham and Jam - British & Commonwealth forces mod for Half Life 2

 

[MarcLodge]

Foamcow,

I'm afraid the answer to that question is beyond my knowledge of javascript. I've looked at the html behind the page by viewing the source in IE6, but it means very little to me as my knowledge of this area of technology is very limited.

Marc

 

[Foamcow]

I meant is his copy of internet explorer using a proxy server?

Is he on the same network as the other users?
It may be that he is seeing a cached version of the page as he isn't actually connecting in the same way as the other users.
His connection may go via a proxy which has cached the page previously (like when he views it prior to making the change). Subsequent requests for the page that go through the same proxy then get served the cached page and not the actual page.

Therefore, if he makes a change and uploads it then reloads the page he is, in fact, loading the original one and not the new one!

After a period of time the cached page will "expire" and any further requests will cause the page to be re-cached by the proxy server.

Check his PCs network settings to see if he is in fact going via a proxy. Then check the other machines to see if they are doing the same thing.

I will bet the problem is related to how the network is set up and internal proxy servers.

<honk>*:O)</honk>
Foamcow Heavy Industries - Web site design in Cheltenham and Gloucester
Ham and Jam - British & Commonwealth forces mod for Half Life 2

 

[Foamcow]

If he is using Internet Explorer for Windows then go to
Tools->Internet options

then choose the Connections Tab

click on LAN Settings at the bottom

check the settings in there, for instance the section at the bottom will make IE use a proxy server


It may also be the case that there is another setting in there that is caching the Javascript file. Does the problem effect straight HTML changes too?

<honk>*:O)</honk>
Foamcow Heavy Industries - Web site design in Cheltenham and Gloucester
Ham and Jam - British & Commonwealth forces mod for Half Life 2

 

[Foamcow]

And finally...


Could it be that the news thingy is a Flash Movie?
Internet Explorer is a nightmare for caching Flash files.
I'm wondering if it could be the same with Java apps and Javascript files.

When I am working with IE and Flash I often need to delete the file from the server, try to refresh the page in IE to force an error then reupload the file for any changes to take effect.

<honk>*:O)</honk>
Foamcow Heavy Industries - Web site design in Cheltenham and Gloucester
Ham and Jam - British & Commonwealth forces mod for Half Life 2

 

[MarcLodge]

Foamcow,
Many thanks for your replies. I will investigate the proxy server settings and see what they are. I've found another post on tek tips that deals with a similar-ish problem and suggests the following code as an answer

<meta http-equiv="expires" content="Mon, 5 Jan 2004 11:00:00 GMT" />
<meta http-equiv="cache-control" content="no-cache" />
<meta http-equiv="pragma" content="no-cache" />

I'm thinking of asking the webmaster to add this to the page to see if it makes any difference, but am not sure whether to advise him to add it to the index.htm page which contains the frames link, or to the actual page itself. Or both! Any ideas?

Marc

 

[Foamcow]

I'm not sure that they would fix the problem, but try adding them to both pages. In fact, I'd probably only bother with the 2nd two tags there.

<honk>*:O)</honk>
Foamcow Heavy Industries - Web site design in Cheltenham and Gloucester
Ham and Jam - British & Commonwealth forces mod for Half Life 2