Odd Caching Behavior

I'm having some odd caching behavior (or I assume that's what it is)
with IE6 and IE7. I have a site built in ASP/VBScript (pre-DotNET).
The site is used to produce tabulations from a largeish database and
there is a pretty extensive form for defining your query. After
results have been displayed, the user can click on the browser's back
button and go back to the filled out form, make any modifications to
their specifications and resubmit the form. That's a nice feature
since there are so many options on the form. Having to fill it out
from scratch each time would be a royal pain.

Nine times out of ten (or perhaps 95 out of 100), when you click the
back button everything works as expected. However, on occasion (and
I'm not sure what the difference is), the form will load but
selections made previously are not maintained -- that is, the form is
blank.

Since it works most of the time (the form is still filled out when you
go back), I assume I have caching, etc. set up correctly.
Nevertheless, I'm a bit stymied by these occasional aberrations.

I know this is asking for a lot but if anyone has any ideas, I'm all
ears. Thanks.

--
H

"Harvey Schmidlapp" <henryhartley@westat.com> wrote in message
news:4a340408-80fb-43f4-821e-f9ee98a042c6@p20g2000yqi.googlegroups.com...
> I'm having some odd caching behavior (or I assume that's what it is)
> with IE6 and IE7. I have a site built in ASP/VBScript (pre-DotNET).
> The site is used to produce tabulations from a largeish database and
> there is a pretty extensive form for defining your query. After
> results have been displayed, the user can click on the browser's back
> button and go back to the filled out form, make any modifications to
> their specifications and resubmit the form. That's a nice feature
> since there are so many options on the form. Having to fill it out
> from scratch each time would be a royal pain.
>
> Nine times out of ten (or perhaps 95 out of 100), when you click the
> back button everything works as expected. However, on occasion (and
> I'm not sure what the difference is), the form will load but
> selections made previously are not maintained -- that is, the form is
> blank.
>

> Since it works most of the time (the form is still filled out when you
> go back), I assume I have caching, etc. set up correctly.
> Nevertheless, I'm a bit stymied by these occasional aberrations.

>
> I know this is asking for a lot but if anyone has any ideas, I'm all
> ears. Thanks.


First find out exactly how the Back button works with
your server. E.g. use Fiddler. E.g. in particular you
need to know whether the re-request contains the input
variables or whether the server is supplying them based
on an E-tag (for example.)


Good luck

Robert Aldwinckle
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