Caching issue with WebHelp

[jknasinski]

My dev team recently reported a caching issue with webhelp. They say that at times when an updated webhelp project is deployed, the browser's cache has to be cleared in order for the correct, most recent files to be displayed. We hadn't noticed this behavior before; just in the last couple of months.
The dev team created a small web.config file that they want me to include with my webhelp projects from now on that they say will fix the caching issue.
Has anyone else heard of this type of issue or dealt with it?
We support various browsers from IE to Chrome and Firefox. The same issue hasn't been reported on one of our other webhelp projects. Both are standard webhelp built with Flare 11.

Instead of using their small web.config file and having to remember each time I deploy to include that file, I'm proposing to just add the following in my targets (target > Advanced tab > Add meta tags to content):

<META http-equiv="Cache-Control" content="no-cache" />
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Pragma" CONTENT="no-cache" />
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Expires" CONTENT="-1" />

Comments?

[mjpitman]

Hi jknasinski,

I've encountered an issue recently after updating the project's headers.h file, where the published webhelp would not catch new ids unless you clear the browser's cache.

Conscious of the age of this thread, but did the idea you proposed clear up this issue, or did you find an alternative solution?

[daphna]

We are constantly struggling with this. Adding the no-cache rule into the metadata does not help. We have been back and forth for years.

My IT resources has asked to revisit...we have talked with MC support before and the answer is the no-cache rule in the metadata. The IT resource has been doing some research and has run across numerous articles that essentially say the same thing: “HTML5 does not include the cache-control or Pragma in meta elements, which is what MC and MC Forum solution is. For example: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/152 ... om-caching

This issues is very frustrating. Any thoughts or suggestion would be much appreciated.

[fchan1]

Hello,

I'm new to Flare and am also encountering this issue.

Has anyone found a way to resolve this besides asking folks to clear their browser cache?

Thanks!