AJAX Refresh Problem w IE Not Refreshing

I’ve been doing a lot of converting of web pages that required the user to refresh the page for updated content to AJAX (eliminates need to refresh). It was all good until I started receiving complaints that data was no longer refreshing in IE.

What I’m using is a AJAX get command like this:

xmlhttp.open(“GET”,”url”,true);
xmlhttp.send();

however, in Internet Explorer, the content never gets refreshed – that is, the AJAX request is getting cached. There are a number of suggested solutions, including using a POST rather than a GET and appending a random string to the request.

The best way to keep AJAX working in IE is to tell the xmlhttp object not to cache content that is older than a certain date; you can do that by changing the request in this fashion (appending 1 line):

xmlhttp.open(“GET”,”url”,true);
xmlhttp.setRequestHeader(“If-Modified-Since”, “Sat, 1 Jan 2000 00:00:00 GMT”);
xmlhttp.send();

This will solve any AJAX caching problem you might encounter. It’s a simple solution, but caused me a big headache!

Also, if you have webpages with ad code on them, each refresh is another impression and can skew your results more than you think! Move to AJAX and you’ll solve that problem :)

I hope this helps those of you playing with AJAX.

12 Comments

  1. Ganesh says:
    September 19, 2011 at 7:51 am

    Thanks. Your big headache reduced mine.

  2. Mark says:
    August 28, 2011 at 3:03 pm

    Thanks so much for letting us know how to fix this!

  3. Conrad says:
    April 30, 2011 at 11:07 am

    Ummm…why not set cache-control in the response header? The following should work very nicely Cache-Control: no-cache

  4. Vincet says:
    April 27, 2011 at 12:28 pm

    Thanks a bunch pal !!!

  5. Maddy257 says:
    April 12, 2011 at 4:49 am

    Thanks you so much, Solved my prob…..

  6. Roberto Rutilo says:
    February 17, 2011 at 7:43 am

    Thank you !!

  7. dhiman says:
    January 26, 2011 at 7:34 am

    Thank you

  8. Wilson says:
    November 14, 2010 at 8:11 am

    Brilliant, Thank you!

  9. Chetan says:
    November 10, 2010 at 6:58 am

    Thanx a mill. it works :)

  10. Jim says:
    July 14, 2010 at 8:13 pm

    Glad I could help Mark and Dillen :)

    Jim

  11. Mark Love says:
    July 14, 2010 at 5:40 pm

    THANK YOU!

  12. Dillen says:
    June 14, 2010 at 5:02 am

    Thanks, I’ve been searching for this for a very long time, thanks for your help.

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