Question

We have a bunch of .js files in a web application which are not located under a single directory. UI was developed separately and it is pretty time consuming to redesign it to have all the *.js files in one place.

The problem is that those files are cached by browsers pretty heavily and this creates a lot of issues with every application update. And we decided to turn off caching for those files.

So, *.js files were included into servlet mapping:

<servlet-mapping>
    <servlet-name>app</servlet-name>
    <url-pattern>*.js</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>

I have tried using mvc:resources but it does not handle url’s masks like this:

<mvc:resources mapping="*.js" location="*.js" cache-period="0"/>

This doesn’t work and I have 404 response back when I am trying to access a js file.

I have also tried mvc:interceptor:

    <mvc:interceptor>
        <mvc:mapping path="*.js"/>
        <bean id="webJSContentInterceptor"
              class="org.springframework.web.servlet.mvc.WebContentInterceptor">
            <property name="cacheSeconds" value="0"/>
            <property name="useExpiresHeader" value="true"/>
            <property name="useCacheControlHeader" value="true"/>
            <property name="useCacheControlNoStore" value="true"/>
        </bean>
    </mvc:interceptor>

This results in 404 error as well.

Is this type of thing possible?

Answer 1

This is not possible. But there are several options:

• Implement a custom Filter, map it to *.js mask and set needed headers from there.
• Handle cache busting in JavaScript. We went this way and added a version number to the path of our JS files.