[Zope-CMF] IE Cache Bug and CachingPolicyManager

[Geoff Davis]

In testing all the new caching code, I ran into a fairly nasty IE bug:

IE pays attention (more or less) to the Cache-Control header when it comes
to requesting new content from the server.  The "more-or-less" part is
because IE 5.5+ introduces some proprietary Cache-Control tokens,
pre-check and post-check, that let IE ignore the headers to some extent (see 
http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/author/perf/perftips.asp ).
Fortunately, this behavior can be turned off by setting Cache-Control:
pre-check=0, post-check=0 

The problem is that after the page has been requested, IE doesn't
necessarily actually render it.  If you have a page with a Last-Modified
tag, under some (all?) circumstances, IE will render what it has in cache
rather than what it has just requested.  My guess is that there is a bug
in IE that causes its internal Last-Modified freshness heuristics to
override explicit Cache-Control freshness declarations and that it pulls
the cached page from the wrong place or at the wrong time.  It was
difficult to track down, but straightforward to work around: I modified
CMFCore/CachingPolicyManager.py to allow you to disable the Last-Modified
header.  To preserve backward compatibility, Last-Modified is on by
default, but you can now explicitly disable it.  I have also added the
ability to set the pre-check and post-check tokens.

As an aside, a very useful tool for working with caching and IE is
Fiddler: http://www.fiddlertool.com/fiddler/
It's basically the equivalent of LiveHTTPHeaders for IE.

I am checking the fixes (with tests) into the 1.5 branch, and Sidnei has
volunteered to backport them to CMF 1.4.

Geoff