Right way to have ASP.NET / IIS NOT cache PDF files

Question

I have the following scenario, and I wanted suggestions on what is the best way to handle this. My web app (ASP.NET 2.0 / IIS 6) generates PDF files, and I have a results page with links to those PDFs.

Now, I noticed that if I visit the results page, click on a PDF file (it opens in a new window), then re-generate the PDF file, and click on the same link in the results page, the OLD PDF is shown, instead of the new one. I had to delete the temporary internet files in order to see the new one.

So, since I'm NOT serving an ASPX that actually writes the PDF (and I do not want the Save dialog to show), but straight linking to the PDF file, I want to know what the best way to make sure the user always sees the latest file in the server, not a cached version.

I'm guessing adding no-cache headers is out of the question. But the PDF request would still go through an HTTP handler, so I'd like to know if I should create a specific HTTP handler to intercept requests for PDFs, or if i should do this at the IIS level...however I dont necessarily want to avoid caching ALL PDF's on that site.

Any suggestions? Thanks in advance for the help.

Answer 1

If your link to the pdf document had a unique querystring appended I believe that would prevent caching. Time in ticks is a good one to use, eg:

string.Format("{0}?t={1}", pdfFileUrl, DateTime.Now.Ticks);

Answer 2

The fact the clearing your temporary internet files gave you the new version shows the browser is the source of the cache. You could turn iis caching off but that wouldn't stop proxies caching the document. If you need to be 100% sure that the user sees that latest version, I suggest using a query string value to cause the url to be different. The query string could be the pdf generation timestamp.