Spring MVC disable caching for resource .js files

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

I realize this answer comes rather late, but here's for future reference.

Serving static resources with ResourceHttpRequestHandlers (Spring 3.2+)

First, you were on the right track with <mvc:resources>, there was just a typo in your path pattern declaration:

• the location must be a folder location where you resources live (this can be on your file system, in your webapp resources, on the classpath, in webJARs...)
• the pattern must take into account your project layout

Let's say you've got the following structure:

src/main/webapp/static/
  |- js/
  |- js/lib/jquery.js
  |- js/main.js
  |- css/style.css

You can serve all your static resources like this:

<mvc:resources mapping="/**" location="/static/"/>

Note: cache-period and other attributes should work just fine.

Resource handling features (Spring 4.1+)

As of Spring 4.1, there are new, more flexible ways to work with this.

For example, you can achieve cache busting with your JS and CSS files like this:

<mvc:resources mapping="/**" location="/static/"/>
  <mvc:resource-chain resource-cache="true">
    <mvc:resolvers>
      <mvc:version-resolver>
        <mvc:content-version-strategy patterns="/**"/>
      </mvc:version-resolver>
    </mvc:resolvers>
  </mvc:resource-chain>
</mvc:resources>

Of course you can achieve the same thing (more elegantly) with javaconfig:

@Override
public void addResourceHandlers(ResourceHandlerRegistry registry) {

  VersionResourceResolver versionResolver = new VersionResourceResolver()
    .addContentVersionStrategy("/**");

  registry.addResourceHandler("/**")
    .addResourceLocations(/static/)
    .resourceChain(true).addResolver(versionResolver);
}

See this blog post and this example app for more on this.