I am building a single page javascript app and when the application starts I use a single javascript file to load every other file I need on the fly. When I hit refresh, according to firebug, my HTML page as well as javascript pages will load with a 304 Not Modified Error and my javascript stops working.
I understand this is due to browser caching, but how can I avoid this? I load the initial HTML page with a single script call
<script src="js/config.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
and then continue to load the rest dynamically from within that script
window.onload = function () {
var scripts = ['http://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jQuery/jquery-1.7.1.min.js', 'js/core.js', 'js/sandbox.js']; //Application scripts
var loaded = 0;
//Callback is executed after all scripts have been loaded.
var callback = function () {
if (loaded + 1 == scripts.length) {
//Create Modules
CORE.loader("js/modules/Login.js", function () {
CORE.createModule('loginForm', Login);
});
//Create HTML bindings.
CORE.createBinding('appContainer', '#Login', 'login.html');
CORE.bindHTML(window.location.hash); //Loads hash based page on startup
} else {
loaded++;
loadScript(scripts[loaded], callback);
}
};
loadScript(scripts[0], callback);
function loadScript(scriptSrc, callback) {
var script = document.createElement('script');
script.type = 'text/javascript';
script.async = true;
script.src = scripts[loaded];
if (script.readyState) {
script.onreadystatechange = function () {
if (script.readyState == 'loaded' || script.readyState == 'complete') {
script.onreadystatechange = null;
callback();
}
};
} else {
script.onload = function () {
callback();
};
}
document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(script);
}
};
I know that Gmail uses cookies to prevent this. Does anyone have any idea how to take that approach? Should I set the cookie on the server and then check it with JS on each page load/refresh and use something like window.location.refresh() if the cookie tells me the page is loaded from cache?
To expand on @Ramesh's answer:
to force a reload of the js file, instead of the cache, use this html:
<script src="js/config.js?v=42" type="text/javascript"></script>
The next time you make changes to that file just +1 the v
. This also works with css files by the way.