I have a show view, that uses a 'Universal Viewer' to load images. The image dimensions come from a json file that comes from a IIIF image server.
I fixed a bug and a new json file exists, but the user's browser is still using the old info.json file.
I understand that I could just have them do a hard-reload, like I myself did on my machine, but many users may be affected, and I'm just damn curious now.
Modern browsers all ship with cache control functionality baked into it. Using a combination of ETags and Cache-Control headers, you can accomplish what you seek without having to change the file names or use cache busting query parameters.
ETags allow you to communicate a token to a client that will tell their browser to update the cached version. This token can be created based on the content creation date, content length, or a fingerprint of the content.
Cache-Control headers allow you to create policies for web resources about how long, who, and how your content can be cached.
Using ETags and Cache-Control headers is a useful way to communicate to users when to update their cache when serving IIIF or any other content. However, adding ETags and Cache-Control this can be quite specific to your local implementation. Many frameworks (like Ruby on Rails) have much of this functionality baked into it. There are also web server configurations that may need to be modified, some sample configurations are available from the HTML5 Boilerplate project that use these strategies.
Sample Apache configurations for:
It depends on where the JSON file is being served from, and how it's being cached.
The guaranteed way to expire the cache on the file is to change the filename every time it changes. This is typically done be renaming it filename-MD5HASH.ext, where the MD5HASH is the MD5 hash of the file.
If you can't change the file name (it comes from a source you can't control, you might be able to get away with adding a caching busting query key to the URL. Something like http://example.com/file.ext?q=123456.
