I'm trying to download (and hopefully cache) a dynamically loaded image in PHP. Here are the headers sent and received:
Request:
GET /url:resource/Pomegranate/resources/images/logo.png HTTP/1.1
Host: pome.local
Connection: keep-alive
Cache-Control: max-age=0
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.22 (KHTML, like Gecko) Ubuntu Chromium/25.0.1364.160 Chrome/25.0.1364.160 Safari/537.22
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate,sdch
Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.8
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.3
Cookie: PHPSESSID=fb8ghv9ti6v5s3ekkmvtacr9u5
Response:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Tue, 09 Apr 2013 11:00:36 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.22 (Ubuntu)
X-Powered-By: PHP/5.3.14 ZendServer/5.0
Expires: Thu, 19 Nov 1981 08:52:00 GMT
Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0
Pragma: no-cache
Content-Disposition: inline; filename="logo"
ETag: "1355829295"
Last-Modified: Tue, 18 Dec 2012 14:44:55 Asia/Tehran
Keep-Alive: timeout=5, max=98
Connection: Keep-Alive
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: image/png
When I reload the URL, the exact same headers are sent and received. My question is what should I send in my response to see the If-None-Match header in the consequent request?
NOTE: I believe these headers were doing just fine not long ago, even though I can not be sure but I think browsers are changed not to sent the If-None-Match header anymore (I used to see that header). I'm testing with Chrome and Firefox and both fail to send the header.
Your response headers include Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache; these prevent caching.
Remove those values (I think must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0 could/should be kept – they tell the browser to check with the server if there was a change).
And I would stick with Last-Modified alone (if the changes to your resources can be detected using this criterion alone) – ETag is a more complicated thing to handle (especially if you want to deal with it in your PHP script yourself), and Google PageSpeed/YSlow advise against this one too.