Server side caching issues

[David Skoglund]

I've read several threads on this subject here and I'm experiencing the same problem. I know what the problem is, but the solution is still a little fuzzy for a couple of reasons.

Background:

My company just refreshed our website. As part of that I replaced a really old help center build with Flare with my new help content built with Flare. It went live yesterday and the help system partially broke. What I mean by that it it would launch, but the TOC only displayed a subset of the topics. The search and all the navigation controls were broken. When you selected a topic in the TOC the server would kick you back to the main page of the company website.

Looking closely at the TOC links, I could tell by the URL they were to targets in the old help center. The server was serving up a cached version of the TOC.

The documentation for our hosting platform says that it caches static assets (CSS, JS, Images, and PDFs for a year. (!) The people who built our new site created a symlink to force the server to recognize the new files. My worry is that it'll just break again when I update content because of the caching issue.

We have a company who built our website and another that is hosting it. At the moment the builders are the go between for this issue. At the moment I can't talk directly to the hosting people to express my concerns.

The builders suggestion is that the static elements get new names every time I upload an update to bypass the caching issue. That's impossible though, right? Things like the index.js that reside in the root out the output have to have consistent names or nothing will work is my understanding.

Hopefully, the hosting company will just be able to tweak a setting, but a little paranoia goes a long way. If I have to have them manually flush the cache each time I upload content changes doesn't seem like a sustainable model.

Thanks for reading.

[Psider]

For - ahem - a competing product I got our IT guys to set the max-age property (server header) for the folder where the toc, index and search js files live to 7 days. It could also be 0 days to never cache. So it should theoretically be easy for the hosting company to set the same for the Flare content either on particular folders or for the entire flare output.

[David Skoglund]

Thanks for the insight. I'll pursue that option if/when I ever get to talk to the hosting people. I'm planning on making frequent updates since it just rolled out, so I'll push for the no cache option for the directory where the Flare output lives.