Reload a page after res.redirect('back') in route

Question

I\'m working on an application which allows you to upload images, and create albums. Everything works fine accept that after an album is created the new album isn\'t shown i

Answer 1

'back' is an alias for req.get('Referrer') so if '/albums' is your referrer you might still experience issues with the browser returning a 304 (http not modified) http status or a browser cached page (common). If you experience that issue you can do a couple of things:

Send some cache clearing headers:

res.header('Cache-Control', 'no-cache, private, no-store, must-revalidate, max-stale=0, post-check=0, pre-check=0');
res.redirect('back');

Or modify the url:

 var url = require('url');
 var u = url.parse(req.get('Referrer'), true, false);
 u.query['v'] = +new Date(); // add versioning to bust cache 
 delete u.search;
 res.redirect(url.format(u));  

Of course if you know the url such as '/albums' you don't have to go though all that rigamarole to add some versioning - just append current timestamp to the url string.

The first way is cleaner and works better imo. I've seen cases when a page doesn't have a referrer even though I clearly came from another page due to caching.