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asp.netasp.net-mvcwebserver-side

Is it possible to detect a page refresh (F5) serverside?

...in comparison to requests of normal link click behaviour. I thought I might be able to use this to throw away some cached stuff on the serverside. For a more technical orientated target audience this could be a relative natural way of clearing a cache for i.e. graphs and charts.

To be clear - I am using ASP.NET MVC

Solution

  • I've just checked the three browsers you're likely to care about, and all three add extra cache headers in the request when you refresh the page. Conceivable you could check for those headers to throw out some server-side cache. It also seems a logical and natural way to do it.

    • IE: adds "Pragma: no-cache"
    • Chrome: adds "Cache-Control: max-age=0" and "If-Modified-Since: Tue, 17 Dec 2013 10:16:22 GMT" (disclaimer: time may vary)
    • Firefox: adds "Cache-Control: max-age=0"

    I just checked this by refreshing this page in all three browsers, and checking Fiddler. It is possible there is more sophisticated logic going on that I haven't caught on to.