html - Random Querystring to avoid IE caching

Question

It is a well known problem that IE caches too much of html, even when giving a Cache-Control: no-cache or Last-Modified header to everypage.

This behaiviour is really troubling when working with querystrings to get dynamic information, as IE considers it to be the same page (i.e.: http://example.com/?id=10) and serves the cached version.

I've solved it adding either a random number or a timestring to the querystring (as others have done) like this http://example.com/?id=10&t=2009-08-06_13:12:56 that I just ignore serverside.

Is there a better option? Is there another, cleaner way to acomplish this? I'm aware that POST isn't cached, but it is semanticaly correct to use GET here.

Answer 1

Assuming you are using jQuery, instead of using $.get or $.getJson, use the more generic $.ajax and explicitly set the cache value to false. The following is an example:

$.ajax({
        url: "/Controller/Action",
        cache: false,
        type: "GET",
        dataType: "json",
        success: function(data, textStatus) {
                         alert("success");
                 }
    });

A little more code required (not much though) than using .getJson or .get but will solve the problem cleanly without appending random numbers.