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

What I ended up doing was having the server map any request for an image at that directory to the source that I was trying to update. I then had my timer append a number onto the end of the name so the DOM would see it as a new image and load it.

E.g.

http://localhost/image.jpg
//and
http://localhost/image01.jpg

will request the same image generation code but it will look like different images to the browser.

var newImage = new Image();
newImage.src = "http://localhost/image.jpg";
var count = 0;
function updateImage()
{
    if(newImage.complete) {
        document.getElementById("theText").src = newImage.src;
        newImage = new Image();
        newImage.src = "http://localhost/image/id/image" + count++ + ".jpg";
    }
    setTimeout(updateImage, 1000);
}