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What is a good strategy for automatically applying and/or updating cache buster variables on my javascript and stylesheet references in an ASP.Net website?

E.g. Transforming

<script type="text/javascript" src="/js/myScript.js" />

to

<script type="text/javascript" src="/js/myScript.js?rev=12345" />

UPDATE: Continuous Integration is not required. I am using continuous integration (Jenkins to be specific), so it would be great if the method for updating the variables was based on the build number for instance.

While I can live with applying the original variables manually in the source code and just updating them via the strategy, it would be a nice addition if the strategy could also apply the original variable if it did not already exist (say to legacy code).

Off the top of my head, I can imagine using a Powershell script that scans through all *.aspx and *.ascx files and uses a regular expression to find the appropriate references and update them. But you know what they say about using regular expressions... then I have two problems :)

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2 Answers 2

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4

You may also want to look into Cassette, RequestReduce and Bundler.

Cassette: Automatically sorts, concatenates, minifies, caches and versions all your JavaScript, CoffeeScript, CSS, LESS, Sass and HTML templates.

RequestReduce Makes your website faster - sometimes much faster - with almost no effort

  • Auto generates sprites from your background images
  • Optimizes Sprite PNG format and compression
  • Minifies CSS and Javascript
  • Optimizes caching headers and ETags
  • Runs on any IIS web site including Classic ASP and PHP
  • Can sync content accross multiple web servers
  • Works well with CDNs
  • Compiles Less, Sass and Coffee script

Bundler: "Compile, Minify, Combine Less/Sass/Css/JS/CoffeeScript files. Easily use from MVC"

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3

The answer to cache buster variables in ASP.Net is to use one of the various CSS/JS minification libraries.

I was thinking that the cache buster variables would need to be updated with each deployment to our servers, but the minification libraries apply a hash tag based on the contents of the individual CSS/JS files.

Since I am developing a .Net 3.5 website my choices were a little restricted. I ended up using SquishIt (available as a NuGet package) and it was SO easy to integrate.

<link href="/<my_css_path>/<css_file_1>.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
<link href="/<my_css_path>/<css_file_2>.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
<link href="/<my_css_path>/<css_file_3>.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />

became

<%= Bundle.Css()
    .Add("~/<my_css_path>")
    .Render("~/<my_css_path>/combined_#.css") %>

and that is basically it! Similar idea with the javascript. As long as debug="true" in your web.config for local development and debug="false" for your staging/production environments, SquishIt will leave your CSS/JS unseparated and unminified for local development and then combine, minify and hash (for cache busting) for your other environments.

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1 Comment

That sounds awesome! Glad they thought of the local non-minified version.

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