Question

I’ve got an IE-specific ajax login status request problem occurring in a demo site I’m creating for my company.

In every internet explorer browser (7-9), this problem occurs, while it works like a champ in ALL others:

after succsesfully logging in, the user is redirected to a landing page which fires off a login status request.

If this login-status request comes back with anything but a “1”, the page is redirected back to the login page.

If you follow the traffic in Developer Tools, you see that the request for that particular status check results in a 304 Not modified (should NEVER happen), and the body of the request appears EMPTY. (It always returns a 0 or 1)…

A HARD refresh (CTRL-F5) of the page with that check in it, STILL results in a 304 from the browser.

Tracking those 304’s with fiddler indicates that there isn’t even a request over the network for that login-status URL, the BROWSER ITSELF is assuming the 304, and failing to send the request.

when visiting the url directly, the response IS ALWAYS a 200 with the appropriate 0 or 1 expected, but when ajax’ed, it more often than not is a 304 and never sends over the network even to confirm the 304 from the server.

Clearing browser history seems to have no effect on whether it changes the 304 to a 200.

doubly weird is that every 10 or so tries, this actually DOES work and the request comes back 200 with a real response, but more often than not it comes back 304 with no response, and the value does not equate to 1 with the cached value (not even sure what it equates to?!)

I have altered the response to this request to have the following headers generated by php:

header('Cache-Control: no-cache');
header('Pragma: no-cache');
header('Expires: -1');

When visiting the URL directly in IE, those headers are present, when the 304 occurs, they are not.

It’s as if IE is actively ignoring that particular request…

Any ideas?

Again, this works in EVERY other browser, literally, but IE of various flavors.

Answer 1

Try adding a random querystring param to url of your status request. like:

'/your/url?breakcache='+Math.random()