I have run into a bit of a caching problem. I’m building a website that
mostly consists of static editable pages. There is a basic
authentication system to restrict who is able to edit the pages and so
on. If you’re logged in, an edit and a destroy link will show up.
This is my problem: If you’re logged in and a page hasn’t been cached
yet, it will be cached with edit/destroy links for everyone else to see.
They can’t edit the pages anyway, so what are they going to need the
links for? And if the page has been cached by a regular user, the
administrator can’t see the links.
And also, when the admin presses “Log in”, I want a flash message to
show up telling him that he has logged in successfully. Again: If the
page hasn’t been cached yet, the flash message will be visible to
everyone. If the page wasn’t cached before, the flash messages won’t
show up.
Does this mean that flash messages and authentication is an impossible
combination? Is there any way to work around this?
–
David T…
http://twitter.com/datra
Does this mean that flash messages and authentication is an impossible
combination? Is there any way to work around this?
–
David T…
http://twitter.com/datra
That’s an easy one. For your case you cannot use page or action caching
as you have a flash. You can only cache using fragment caching, and you
have to place your fragments in the correct places otherwise you will
have the behavior you describe.
Caching is a double edged sword.
Fernando P. wrote:
Does this mean that flash messages and authentication is an impossible
combination? Is there any way to work around this?
That’s an easy one. For your case you cannot use page or action caching
as you have a flash. You can only cache using fragment caching, and you
have to place your fragments in the correct places otherwise you will
have the behavior you describe.
Caching is a double edged sword.
I think you’re right. I have been googling around to find something, and
it appears to be, that I’m not the only one having these kind of
problems. I have seen solutions like displaying flash messages with
Javascript (that requires a 5000 lines Prototype library, though), I’ve
been reading about conditional caching, clever caching with memcached
and so forth.
But nothing actually solves the problem without giving new ones. So I
guess I have to use fragment caching?
–
David T…
http://twitter.com/datra
Fernando P. wrote:
But nothing actually solves the problem without giving new ones. So I
guess I have to use fragment caching?
We use fragment caching on our VoD website: http://www.digiprof.fr , you
cannot do page caching if once the user is authenticated, he gets a
custom page.
PS: yeah Prototype is huge, we are currently considering other lighter
options, such as mootools.
It would have been kind of frustrating to have 5000 lines of Javascript
hanging around just to make one thing little thing work: Cacheable
Flash. So I don’t want to do that.
I’ll try fragment caching, then. Thanks! 
Does this mean that flash messages and authentication is an impossible
combination? Is there any way to work around this?
I am using Cacheable Flash for the Rails Magazine web site and it
works rather well (you can see it in action on login).
The trick is to page cache only pages for anonymous users (using an
apache or nginx rewrite rule to detect specific cookies/authenticated
users).
Including Prototype or other Javascript libraries is not a huge deal
as these can be cached on the client (so the transfer hit is incurred
only on the first request). On the other hand it’s overkill to
include them solely for accessing cookies or dealing with cacheable
flash.
Best regards,
Olimpiu
On Jan 1, 1:02 pm, David T. [email protected]
I think you’re right. I have been googling around to find something, and
it appears to be, that I’m not the only one having these kind of
problems. I have seen solutions like displaying flash messages with
Javascript (that requires a 5000 lines Prototype library, though), I’ve
been reading about conditional caching, clever caching with memcached
and so forth.
But nothing actually solves the problem without giving new ones. So I
guess I have to use fragment caching?
We use fragment caching on our VoD website: http://www.digiprof.fr , you
cannot do page caching if once the user is authenticated, he gets a
custom page.
PS: yeah Prototype is huge, we are currently considering other lighter
options, such as mootools.
Best regards,