[RESOLVED] Final Thoughts

daltman1967

"Alright," said Deep Thought. "The Answer to the Great Question ..."
"Yes ...!"
"Of Life, the Universe and Everything ..." said Deep Thought.
"Yes ...!"
"Is ..." said Deep Thought, and paused.
"Yes ...!"
"Is ..."
"Yes ...!!!...?"
"Forty-two," said Deep Thought, with infinite majesty and calm.

Now that Deep Thought has plunged its way into the infinite reaches of the universe and has decided that the Answer is 42, there still remains a question.

I have a MYSQL database with its front-end written in PHP. The admin can log in with his user name & password, and then, using basic functions, add a menu to the drop-down menu bar which appears on each page. The PHP code takes various pieces of the file, then concats them together with the new information, and voila! A new menu code is created, complete with the new item in place and a corresponding page for it to link to.

My Ultimate Question of PHP programming, the Universe, and Everything is thus:
Why must I reload (F5) the HTML page five or six times to see the result? Is there any way to update this more rapidly?

I'm guessing that the culprit here is the way IE stores its files, and that it takes it a while to realize that things on the server have changed, and so go and get the new copy rather than displaying the old, outdated copy.

Any chance anyone out there has any answers? Phouchg and Loonquawl are patiently waiting.

Krik

Sounds like you have IE caching websites. Try disabling any website capture software in IE or that maybe an addon.

If all else fails start using a "true" web developers browser, like FireFox. :p

daltman1967

I don't have any caching software; IE is simply set to whatever its default setup is. However, I'm not concerned about MY browser; I'm concerned about the people viewing my site. I want to ensure that once a change is made to the page, they will see it right away, without having to hit refresh five or six times.

Any ideas?

Krik

It could be just your browser. So if you install another browser like firefox, safari or google chrome you could find out if it is just your browser or not.

The only other possibility is that you wrote your code to cache the site and use the cached version. And then at certain points it caches the updates and loads that for you.

daltman1967

Actually, I'm getting the same result in Firefox as well. The page gets written to the server (because I could download it via FTP immediately), but doesn't show in the browser until I've refreshed several times.

daltman1967

Actually, it may not be the browser at all. I just went through the whole process in Firefox. The change didn't become visible until I had refreshed the page several times. However, when I switched over to the IE window that was already open on the same page, I only had to refresh it once. I did the same thing vice-versa.

I know that IE and Firefox cache their files differently, and in different locations. So therefore, the problem must be the availability of the page itself. It's been written to the server -- available for FTP -- but it must take a while before IE or Firefox can see that it's there.

Any suggestions?

paulnaj

You could do a forced refresh just to see if that makes a difference ...

<?php
header("Cache-Control: no-cache, must-revalidate"); // HTTP/1.1
header("Expires: Mon, 26 Jul 1997 05:00:00 GMT"); // Date in the past
?>

... at the very top of any page.

daltman1967

Well, that was the first thing I tried, actually. However, it won't work that way because the headers have already been sent. Plus, I was pressing refresh manually five or six times before I saw the update.

Anyway, this problem is resolved. Apparently, all I have to do is wait about ten seconds or so, and the page comes up perfectly the first time. I'm not sure why there's a delay -- if it's the hosting company, or just the nature of the beast -- but there it is.

Long live Deep Thought!