How to prevent Grails from caching old versions of gsp file?

Question

I am making modifications to /grails-app/views/index.gsp.

When I save the file and refresh http://localhost%3A8080/index.gsp in Firefox, I am getting an old version of the file.

Is there a way to prevent Grails from caching and rendering old versions of the file?

(I tried restarting the server and clearing Firefox's cache.)

Thanks!

Answer 1

Make sure you are running in dev mode (i.e., grails run-app and not grails test|prod run-app, test and production will enable caching of the pages. If you are in dev mode, try holding the shift key when click the Firefox refresh.

Answer 2

There doesn't seem to be a simple way to do this, but it's not much work. My solution subclasses the servlet that renders GSPs (and also the controller that's used for non-GSP requests).

Here's the servlet subclass:

package com.burtbeckwith;

import java.io.IOException;

import javax.servlet.ServletException;
import javax.servlet.http.HttpServletRequest;
import javax.servlet.http.HttpServletResponse;

import org.codehaus.groovy.grails.web.pages.GroovyPagesServlet;

public class CachingPageServlet extends GroovyPagesServlet {

   private static final String HEADER_PRAGMA = "Pragma";
   private static final String HEADER_EXPIRES = "Expires";
   private static final String HEADER_CACHE_CONTROL = "Cache-Control";

   @Override
   public void doPage(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response) throws ServletException, IOException {
      response.setHeader(HEADER_PRAGMA, "no-cache");
      response.setDateHeader(HEADER_EXPIRES, 1L);
      response.setHeader(HEADER_CACHE_CONTROL, "no-cache");
      response.addHeader(HEADER_CACHE_CONTROL, "no-store");
      super.doPage(request, response);
   }
}

and you'll need to replace the original in web.xml (run "grails install-templates" and edit src/templates/war/web.xml):

<servlet>
   <servlet-name>gsp</servlet-name>
   <servlet-class>com.burtbeckwith.CachingPageServlet</servlet-class>
</servlet>

and you'll probably also want to do the same for Controller-based responses, so to do that use this controller subclass:

package com.burtbeckwith;

import javax.servlet.http.HttpServletRequest;
import javax.servlet.http.HttpServletResponse;

import org.codehaus.groovy.grails.web.servlet.mvc.SimpleGrailsController;
import org.springframework.web.servlet.ModelAndView;

public class CachingSimpleGrailsController extends SimpleGrailsController {

   private static final String HEADER_PRAGMA = "Pragma";
   private static final String HEADER_EXPIRES = "Expires";
   private static final String HEADER_CACHE_CONTROL = "Cache-Control";

   @Override
   public ModelAndView handleRequest(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response) throws Exception {
      response.setHeader(HEADER_PRAGMA, "no-cache");
      response.setDateHeader(HEADER_EXPIRES, 1L);
      response.setHeader(HEADER_CACHE_CONTROL, "no-cache");
      response.addHeader(HEADER_CACHE_CONTROL, "no-store");
      return super.handleRequest(request, response);
   }
}

and you'll need to register it in grails-app/conf/spring/resources.groovy to override the regular Spring bean:

mainSimpleController(com.burtbeckwith.CachingSimpleGrailsController) {
   grailsApplication = ref('grailsApplication', true)
}

The shared header-setting code should probably be extracted into a utility class instead of being copy/pasted like I did here.

Answer 3

If you simply want to disable cache for your browser while development, you can use Web Developer add on for Firefox:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/60

Install this add on & choose "Disable cache". Remember, that will disable caching for all the websites.

Answer 4

This DOESN'T work. super.doPage doesnt work because it doesnt compile. There is no doPage method in the super object!