Why does back-buttoning to a cgi script-output page yield 'Page expired'?

[dyfn]

Script invoked with post method:

<FORM METHOD="POST" ACTION="http://url/cgi-bin/search_engine.cgi"> wit
+h
<INPUT TYPE="text" SIZE="30" NAME="keywords" MAXLENGTH="80">

Returns page of site urls.

Originally posted as a Categorized Question.

[Anonymous Monk]

This is probably a feature:

Where I have CGI-generated pages I often set an expiry date of 'now' to force the browser to reload each time the page is accessed. I want to avoid the cache giving out-of-date info. On Netscape I notice that this gives a 'Page expired' error on back-button (which is better than using old page!).

Could be you've got something similar?

[Russ]

This is really a feature, though many users find it an annoyance. In the HTTP standard, the intent is to limit network traffic transferring files that have not changed. So, if your browser has already received a file, it will not fetch it over and over again (unless you have set it do so).

Dynamically created content — like the output of cgi scripts — needs an expiration to let your browser know how long it will be valid. Imagine you are coding a web app that shows the results of a monitoring process that updates every five minutes. If you know your results will be the same until the next "refresh" in three minutes, you can tell browsers the data will expire in three minutes and prevent them from executing your computationally expensive code until you have something new to report.

If you don't tell the browser how long the data will be valid, it won't know when to refresh from the server and when to display its cached data.

Users commonly expect the Back button to merely return to what was last shown, but this is an example of a user interface not doing what is expected. Refusing to show anything because the old result has expired seems invasive when the cache still holds the last page viewed, but that is a common (standard?) browser behavior.

So, to let the browser keep its results and show them to the user as often as s/he wants, set the expires time in the HTTP header.

# Cache these results for one hour
print $cgi->header(expires => '+1h');

There are several cache control headers. See cianoz's answer for examples; see The W3C standard for more information.

[DarkSniper]

i solved this by setting the expiry time on all my headers to +1h.

print $cgi->header(expires => '+1h');

Originally posted as a Categorized Answer.

[cianoz]

maybe http headers sent by the script contains something like:

cache-control: no-cache, must-revalidate
pragma: no-cache

if you have the program "wget" you can verify by typing:

wget -S "http://your.url/here"

so as pointed before maybe is a feature...

[Zecho]

Oops, scratch that first one.. I did say I was a newbie right?



 if $hidden_string eq "true"{
           &dothis;
        }

To avoid all the problems with hitting the back button, I changed it to this

 if $hidden_string eq "true"{
           $hidden_string = "";
           &dothis;
        }

Originally posted as a Categorized Answer.

[Zecho]

I'm still a newbie, but I ran into this yesterday. I wanted to be able to return from a sub that required a variable to be set



 if $hidden_string eq "true"{
           &dothis;
        }

To avoid all the problems with hitting the back button, I changed it to this

 if (defined($hidden_string)){
           $hidden_string = "";
           &dothis;
        }

Originally posted as a Categorized Answer.