Prevent IE caching

Question

I am developing a Java EE web application using Struts. The problem is with Internet Explorer caching. If an user logs out he can access some pages because they are cached and no request is made. If I hit refresh it works fine. Also if an user goes to login page again it won't redirect him because that page is also cached.

Two solutions come to my mind:

1. Writing an Interceptor (servlet filter like) to add to response header no-cache etc.
2. Or or put <meta> tags at each page.

Which one should I do?

Answer 1

Rather set the following headers on the HttpServletResponse of the page(s) in question so that you don't need to copypaste it over all pages manually:

response.setHeader("Cache-Control", "no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate"); // HTTP 1.1.
response.setHeader("Pragma", "no-cache"); // HTTP 1.0.
response.setDateHeader("Expires", 0); // Proxies.

This is equivalent to setting the following meta headers in the page(s) manually:

<meta http-equiv="Cache-Control" content="no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate">
<meta http-equiv="Pragma" content="no-cache">
<meta http-equiv="Expires" content="0">

Also see this answer. Don't forget to clear browser cache before testing ;)