Rails - Feb 2006 - Page caching when name contains a dot (period)

Hi Everyone,

Just thought I''d post some details of an interesting little quirk
I''ve found
with page caching.

For a site I''ve just built for a small music festival, there are a
number of
artist profiles.  I''m storing the artists in my database, but using 
caches_page to speed things up when displaying the details to the public.

I''ve also made it so that instead of the numerical ID appearing in the
URL, it
uses the artist''s name instead.  So if someone called "Bob
Smith" was
playing, the URL would be: /artists/Bob+Smith

Now, with the page caching, it works fine for most of the artists, since Bob 
Smith''s cached page gets stored in myapp/public/artists/Bob+Smith.html

But what if "B. Smith" was playing - you''d expect it to
generate
"B.+Smith.html", but it doesn''t, just a file called
"B.+Smith" with no ".html"
on the end of it.  It seems the caching system does not add a file extension 
to a page name that already has a dot (period) in it.

The end result of this is that Apache (this is on Dreamhost, btw) fails to 
recognise that the cached page is HTML (since it has no extension) and serves 
the raw HTML as text/plain... not pretty!

Furthermore, you won''t notice this on the first page view, since at the
point
it generates the cached page using Rails, I guess it''s serving up the
result
from the Rails controller, rather than the newly generated cached page.

This problem only becomes apparent on the *second* page view - and only then 
if you do a shift-reload forced refresh from the server to bypass your local 
browser''s cache.

I quickly tried renaming the problematic cache files and putting
".html" on
the end of their names just to see if that helped, but then we''re back
to
square one - the cache thinks it''s the first time that page has been
viewed,
so a new file without a ".html" gets created (and works first time),
and then
you''re back to the raw HTML being served up as plain text on subsequent
views.

So, the workaround for this is to (assuming all the pages that are being 
cached should be served as text/html) make a .htaccess file with the 
following line in it, and put it in the same directory as the problematic 
cached files:

ForceType text/html

That solves the problem and serves all the pages (even those without file 
extensions) as text/html - though whether this is a bigger issue (maybe even 
a slight bug) with caches_page, I guess is up for debate.

Anyway, I thought I''d post my easy workaround in case anyone else finds
themselves in the same situation.  (Though surely I''m not the first one
to
encounter this?)

Cheers,

~Dave

-- 

Dave Silvester
Rent-A-Monkey Website Development
http://www.rentamonkey.com/

PGP Key: http://www.rentamonkey.com/pgpkey.asc

Dave Silvester wrote:
> So, the workaround for this is to (assuming all the pages that are being
> cached should be served as text/html) make a .htaccess file with the
> following line in it, and put it in the same directory as the 
> problematic
> cached files:
> 
> ForceType text/html
> 
> That solves the problem and serves all the pages (even those without 
> file
> extensions) as text/html - though whether this is a bigger issue (maybe 
> even
> a slight bug) with caches_page, I guess is up for debate.
> 
> Anyway, I thought I''d post my easy workaround in case anyone else
finds
> themselves in the same situation.  (Though surely I''m not the
first one
> to
> encounter this?)
I can''t be sure whether you are the first, but you certainly
weren''t the
last. Thanks for this. I ended up putting that directive in the overall 
apache2 config file, instead of using the .htaccess, because then 
manually removing the cache doesn''t remove the solution.

Thanks,
ben
-- 
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