Forcing reload of Blazor client after publishing changes

Question

I have a Blazor app that I'm deploying to Azure for some alpha testing. I've managed to do this and I can run the app from the website just fine.

The problem comes when I make changes to the client and server projects and republish them. Whatever browser is running the client will run whatever is already in the browser cache until the browser history is cleared. That means until the history is cleared the app appears broken because the client requests on the old version don't match the new server API - not to mention my client side changes don't get tested.

How can I force a reload of the client when I publish my changes? Do I have to tell the browser not to cache my app (not sure how on blazor) and take the performance hit until my app stabilizes? Or is there a way to force a client reload after the first API call using some middleware or something?

Or am I missing something?

Edit: It may be relevant that I used the PWA template provided in Blazor WebAssembly 3.2.0 Preview 2. I'm still running the app from a browser, but it seems possible that enabling the PWA option changed the behavior of the app even when running it as a regular website.

Answer 1

Since your app is a PWA, you can declare a js file for registration in the navigator.serviceWorker object. This my.js file can contain a const CACHE_VERSION = 1.0. Updating this value should force the client to download the latest files. See Jeremy Likness' blog post for more info.

Answer 2

if you are working on dot net core3.X PWA app, you can add comment in service-worker.published.js so that when browser will compare its cached service worker with updated one, browser will track the changes and load new one.