What does Indy's HandleRedirect do?

Question

I'm having some trouble reading files with Indy from a site that has WordPress installed.

It appears that the site is configured to redirect all hits to sitename/com/wordpress.

Can I use HandleRedirect to turn that off so I can read files from the root folder?

What is the normal setting for this property? Any downsides to using it for this purpose?

(Edit: it appears that my problem may be caused by Windows cacheing of a file I've accessed before through Indy. I'm using fIDHTTP.Request.CacheControl := 'no-cache'; is that adequate?

Answer 1

When the server sends a 3xx result for a request, the HandleRedirects property controls whether Indy will immediately turn around and issue a new request using the new location. The alternative is that Indy will return the response code to your program. You're welcome to handle it yourself with the OnRedirect event, but if the server bothers to send anything in addition to the response code, it's unlikely to be of much use to your program. It's not as though there are hidden files that the redirection is preventing you from downloading. Set the property to true and let Indy take care of the redirection for you.

It's probably not the case that Windows is caching anything for your program. Indy doesn't use the OS cache. The Cache-Control header is an instruction to a proxy or the so-called origin server that it should not satisfy your request using a cached response without validating it with the origin server. Maybe WordPress has a cache of its own that you're by-passing.