Is Safari on iOS 6 caching $.ajax results? post Cache

Posted 2020-09-28 zzfx

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12506897/is-safari-on-ios-6-caching-ajax-results

Since the upgrade to iOS 6, we are seeing Safari‘s web view take the liberty of caching $.ajaxcalls. This is in the context of a PhoneGap application so it is using the Safari WebView. Our $.ajax calls are POST methods and we have cache set to false {cache:false}, but still this is happening. We tried manually adding a TimeStamp to the headers but it did not help.

We did more research and found that Safari is only returning cached results for web services that have a function signature that is static and does not change from call to call. For instance, imagine a function called something like:

getNewRecordID(intRecordType)

This function receives the same input parameters over and over again, but the data it returns should be different every time.

Must be in Apple‘s haste to make iOS 6 zip along impressively they got too happy with the cache settings. Has anyone else seen this behavior on iOS 6? If so, what exactly is causing it?

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The workaround that we found was to modify the function signature to be something like this:

getNewRecordID(intRecordType, strTimestamp)

and then always pass in a TimeStamp parameter as well, and just discard that value on the server side. This works around the issue. I hope this helps some other poor soul who spends 15 hours on this issue like I did!