Question

I’m using Django Cache to cache certain pages. I’m using the @vary_on_cookie decorator to allow logged in users to cache specific user details. However I need to clear the cache of the particular user for a particular page.

i.e. I need a way to generate the same key that the django middleware cache generates the key, using the cookies and the path etc. Then I can use the low level cache to clear the particular entry myself.

How do I go about doing this?

Answer 1

The function you are looking for is located in django.middleware.cache:

>>> from django.middleware.cache import get_cache_key as gk
>>> help(gk)

will return the following:

get_cache_key(request, key_prefix=None, method='GET', cache=None)
    Returns a cache key based on the request path and query. It can be used
    in the request phase because it pulls the list of headers to take into
    account from the global path registry and uses those to build a cache key
    to check against.

keep in mind that you might define your own key generation mechanism by setting the variable KEY_FUNCTION manually.

HTH!