Force Refresh of cached search files?

[Sara@PAS]

Arg, the forum ate my post. Here's another try:

Some users testing our published WebHelp are getting weird results because their browsers have cached old versions of Search_Chunk and other output files from previous visits. Obviously, we have lots of files that keep the same filename and size, but have very different content, between one build and another (esp as developers keep pulling features out).

For example, they do a search and the results listing includes pages that have been pulled; when they click, they (correctly) get a File Not Found error, because that page doesn't exist. But clearly, the search is using an old Search_chunk file instead of the latest published one.

Other users are seeing the newest published help and have no problem, because there's nothing in their cache.

Is there ANYTHING we can do to force users to get the latest version of files, or clear their cache?

Or are we stuck writing an FAQ that tells them to clear their temporary Internet files if they have a problem?

[LTinker68]

Hmmm. There's nothing you can do in Flare, but I'm pretty sure there's Javascript you can manually add that would clear the cache when the help is loaded. Unfortunately, I think you'd have to manually add that code to the default.htm, default_CSH.htm, and default_Left.htm pages after every build because there's no way to add code to those pages from within Flare.

You could also check with your web server admin. I believe there are options that can be set at the web server to do the same thing. Just make sure it's not set to also clear the cookies, because that will blow out the Favorites options the user may have saved. Unless you didn't enable the Favorites feature, in which case it doesn't matter.

If the help is being launched from the user's computer, then I think you're stuck with the Javascript (or other language) on the default page option.

And, of course, submit a feature request to MadCap asking for an option that can be enabled in Flare that would automatically add the necessary code to the default*.htm pages.

[Sara@PAS]

Thanks! I'll pass this on to our script guru and see what he comes up with.