Refresh image with a new one at the same url

Question

I am accessing a link on my site that will provide a new image each time it is accessed.

The issue I am running into is that if I try to load the image in the background and then update the one on the page, the image doesn't change--though it is updated when I reload the page.

var newImage = new Image();
newImage.src = "http://localhost/image.jpg";

function updateImage()
{
if(newImage.complete) {
    document.getElementById("theText").src = newImage.src;
    newImage = new Image();
    number++;
    newImage.src = "http://localhost/image/id/image.jpg?time=" + new Date();
}

    setTimeout(updateImage, 1000);
}

Headers as FireFox sees them:

HTTP/1.x 200 OK
Cache-Control: no-cache, must-revalidate
Pragma: no-cache
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: image/jpeg
Expires: Fri, 30 Oct 1998 14:19:41 GMT
Server: Microsoft-HTTPAPI/1.0
Date: Thu, 02 Jul 2009 23:06:04 GMT

I need to force a refresh of just that image on the page. Any ideas?

Answer 1

Try adding a cachebreaker at the end of the url:

newImage.src = "http://localhost/image.jpg?" + new Date().getTime();

This will append the current timestamp automatically when you are creating the image, and it will make the browser look again for the image instead of retrieving the one in the cache.