jQuery html response

Question

Hello,
Is it possible to determine if a response returned by $.ajax was served from the browser's cache or was fresh?

Thanks.

Answer 1

No, that's not possible. What you can do is to create a new URL every time (eg: by appending a random string to the URL, which is ignored by the script on the server), or by setting the response's cache headers appropriately.

See: http://www.mnot.net/cache_docs/#CACHE-CONTROL

You might want to set max-age, no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate or a combination of the previous.

Answer 2

You can use the following in jQuery to make sure it does not cache:

$.ajaxSetup({cache: false}});

Am not sure what you are looking to achieve.

If you really want to know if the data is stale, you can do something like:

1. Make your server written return a unique string each and every time it is called
2. Check if this string exists in your javascript temp variables
3. If yes, its stale, if no, its new.