The app I'm currently working on needs to present a notification to the user only when a networking request returns a non-cached response.
The app uses Alamofire for networking requests.
How can I determine if a response from Alamofire came from the cache or not?
the only way is to check HTTP header fields in HTTP response. Cache-Control field tells all caching mechanisms from server to client whether they may cache this object. It is measured in seconds. Cache-Control: max-age=3600 means that the content of respond can be one hour old.
if you need non cached respond from server, you have to specify Cache-Control field in your request as Cache-Control: no-cache
there is no difference if you are using Alamofire or not
Related
According to the documentation if you use the default useProtocolCachePolicy the logic is as follows:
If a cached response does not exist for the request, the URL loading system fetches the data from the originating source.
Otherwise, if the cached response does not indicate that it must be revalidated every time, and if the cached response is not stale (past its expiration date), the URL loading system returns the cached response.
If the cached response is stale or requires revalidation, the URL loading system makes a HEAD request to the originating source to see if the resource has changed. If so, the URL loading system fetches the data from the originating source. Otherwise, it returns the cached response.
However, my experimentation (see below) has shown this to be completely false. Even if the response is cached it is never used, and no HEAD request is ever made.
Scenario
I am making a request to a URL that returns ETag and Last-Modified headers which never change. I have made the request at least once so the response is already cached (which I can verify by looking at the cache DB for the app on the iOS simulator)
Using useProtocolCachePolicy (the default)
If I have a URLSession with a URLSessionConfiguration with requestCachePolicy set to useProtocolCachePolicy then the response is cached (I can see it in the cache DB), but the cached response is never used. Repeated requests to the same URL always make a new GET request without If-None-Match or If-Modified-Since headers, so the server always returns HTTP 200 with the full response. The cached response is ignored.
Using reloadRevalidatingCacheData on every URLRequest
If I set the cachePolicy on each URLRequest to reloadRevalidatingCacheData then I see caching in action. Each time I make the request, a GET request is made with the If-None-Match and If-Modified-Since headers set to the values of the ETag and Last-Modified headers, respectively, of the cached response. As nothing has changed, the server responds with a 304 Not Modified, and the locally cached response is returned to the caller.
Using reloadRevalidatingCacheData only on the URLSessionConfiguration
If I only set requestCachePolicy = . reloadRevalidatingCacheData on the URLSessionConfiguration (instead of on each URLRequest) then when the app starts only the first request uses cache headers and gets a 304 Not Modified response. Subsequent requests are normal GET requests without any cache headers.
Conclusion
All the other cache policy settings are basically variants of "only use cached data" or "never use the cache" so are not relevant here.
There is no scenario in which URLSession makes a HEAD request as the documentation claims, and no situation in which it just uses cached data without revalidation based on expiration date information in the original response.
The workaround I will use is to set cachePolicy = .reloadRevalidatingCacheData on every URLRequest to get some level of local caching, as 304 Not Modified response only return headers and no data so there is a saving of network traffic.
If anyone as any better solutions, or knows how to get URLSession working as documented, then I would love to know.
Service response headers should include:
Cache-Control: must-revalidate
Apple will use this instruction to implement .useProtocolCachePolicy as described in documentation.
In my iOS app I want to cache images that are requested from different destinations. For downloading images I use URLSessionDataTasks with the default caching mechanism provided by URLSession.shared, which makes use of the NSURLRequestUseProtocolCachePolicy.
The caching works basically fine. Responses are being cached and cache headers like etag and cache-control "max-age" are correctly being handled. But if the server responds with the cache-control header set to "no-cache", the URLCache of the URLSession is still caching the image. I can access the cached response via URLCache.shared.cachedResponse(for: request) and also a new data task with the same request will return time image from the cache (which I validated by using Charles proxy and I'm not seeing the request I am awaiting).
Why isn't it correctly handling the respond's cache header? Do I need to manually check the respond's cache headers?
The no-cache directive doesn't mean "don't store it in the cache". Rather it instructs the cache not to serve a cached response without validating with the server first. The [RFC7234][1] specification says the following regarding the no-cache directive.
The "no-cache" response directive indicates that the response MUST NOT
be used to satisfy a subsequent request without successful validation
on the origin server. This allows an origin server to prevent a cache
from using it to satisfy a request without contacting it, even by
caches that have been configured to send stale responses.
If the no-cache response directive specifies one or more field-names,
then a cache MAY use the response to satisfy a subsequent request,
subject to any other restrictions on caching. However, any header
fields in the response that have the field-name(s) listed MUST NOT be
sent in the response to a subsequent request without successful
revalidation with the origin server. This allows an origin server to
prevent the re-use of certain header fields in a response, while still
allowing caching of the rest of the response.
So what will happen is that for "fresh" responses with the no-cache directive, a conditional request will be sent to verify whether the stored response can be used. If the response is still valid, the server will send a 304 - Not Modified response. Upon receiving the 304 response, the cache will serve the stored response with the no-cache directive. If the stored response is no longer valid, the server will send a new response.
[1]: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7234#section-5.2.2
I'm getting data from backend using AFNetworking and set request's cachePolicy as NSURLRequestUseProtocolCachePolicy.
The response headers contain ETag value and Transfer-Encoding is chunked.
In the second time I call the same API, it gets the fresh data instead of getting from cache as expected.
I notice that if the response is not chunked (contain Content-Length header), caching work perfectly
My question is: is it possible to cache chunked response in iOS?
Thank you for any advice
NSURLCache, which AFNetworking uses for caching, doesn't support caching this type of request.
You could try:
using SDURLCache, an open-source alternative that gives you more control, or
subclassing NSURLCache yourself to roll your own implementation
using requests that have supported caching headers
I use a web application that's returning a Content-MD5 header but in my iOS app, I cannot retrieve that header using [NSHTTPURLResponse allHeaderFields] (whereas I can see it when I use cURL).
Does anyone know if iOS is deliberately removing that header?
So I've figured out what's happened.
Our SaaS provider has activated gzip by default on non-production instances. As mentioned in some other threads, NSURLConnection supports gzip compression transparently and will automatically send the Accept-Encoding: gzip HTTP header. When the response is received, NSURLConnection decompresses the content and removes the Content-Md5 header (because the Content-MD5 is a hash of the compressed data), which is why I'm not seeing it in the list of received headers.
We are building an iOS app that uses AFNetworking to connect to a server running Tornado. The server includes the header Cache-Control: private, max-age=900 in the response. When running the server on my local machine, I can tell that AFNetworking uses the cached values because there are no requests received by the server on repeated requests from the app. When we deploy the same Tornado server to the test machine, each request from the app results in a request received on the server, ignoring the cached value.
The only difference between the two setups are the URL of the server and the fact that the test server is accessed over a HTTPS connection, while the localhost uses HTTP. Does HTTPS affect the caching by AFNetworking, and if so, how can we get AFNetworking to respect the cache header?
Not sure if its gonna be any help but here it is anyway:
AFNetworking uses NSURLConnection which uses NSURLCache shared cache. AFNetworking absolutely transparent in cache regard and doesn't do anything specific.
My requests are https and were caching just fine.
Cache-Control response directives allow an origin server to override the default cacheability of a response:
private
Indicates that all or part of the response message is intended for a single user and MUST NOT be cached by a shared cache. This allows an origin server to state that the specified parts of the
response are intended for only one user and are not a valid response for requests by other users. A private (non-shared) cache MAY cache the response.
http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec14.html#sec14.9.1
If acceptable try to change policy to public .
Log headers on response from the app and look at your cache.db and see if in fact something is caching there.
Try to configure shared cache - something along the lines of
int cacheSizeMemory = 1*1024*1024; // 4MB
int cacheSizeDisk = 100*1024*1024; // 100MB
[[NSURLCache sharedURLCache] setMemoryCapacity:cacheSizeMemory];
[[NSURLCache sharedURLCache] setDiskCapacity:cacheSizeDisk];
Another good read about this here
http://petersteinberger.com/blog/2012/nsurlcache-uses-a-disk-cache-as-of-ios5/