refreshing the BLOB

I've made a small web application about movies. For those interested
to see it work : go to http://www.gertcuppens.org/servlet/cluif.
The web app works with servlets and JSP's.

Now the problem is this : in the local version, I can select on the first
page the letter "B" to get all movies starting with a B. When I select
, say, "Bad Santa" in thsi list, I can see the detail screen containing
the poster of the movie (a BLOB).
If I go back to the list and select "the Blob" from 1958, I see the poster
with the photo of Steve Mc QUeen. If I go back to the list once more,
I can select "the Blob" from 1988, and I see the poster from this movie.

So locally, everything is OK. Then I published the web application on my
web site, and this still keeps on working.
But when I go to the office, and try to go to my web application at work,
whichever poster I see first, this is the poster that will be shown on all
the other detail screens.
So, for instance, with the above scenarion, I see the data from "bad santa"
and its poster. If I go to the blob, I see the data of the blob (title, year)
but still the poster of "bad santa".

So, at work, I can only view the first poster, even though I select other
movies. Can anyone tell me where the error is ?

The error has been found : it was due to the caching of
the proxyserver at work. The fact that I wrote
made the proxyserver think he already had done that when I asked him
for a second poster. So, he always kept on showing the first poster .

What is the solution ? Well, a very simple one : add a parameter
so the proxyserver thinks he has to do something different.
The most simple thing is to add a parameter equal to date + time.

So, writing the following lines did the trick :



With this line I fooled the proxyserver and got every poster I asked for.
I thought this might interest some other members of this forum.

This isn't directly related to your question [in fact, I haven't finished reading your posts], but I clicked the link in your first post, and it displayed the HTML tags as plain text.

how does /gco/cluifimg know which image to return?

what happens if i were to just access http://domain/gco/cluifimg ?

Myself, I would have added a parameter to the image... perhaps movie id or something.
This way, the proxy CAN cache if it knows it's already returned that certain image.

Example: <img src="/gco/cluifimg?id=100">

<picky-observation>Where's your ALT text? </picky-observation>

I have a javabean to know which image should be displayed.
Inside the cluifFilmDetail.jsp I have added



this javabean contains the filmposter found in the database.
With/gco/cluifimg I refer to the web.xml inside the gco folder of the webapps folder
of Tomcat. This web.xml contains the following lines



And so I refer to a servlet who does nothing else than accepting a blob and writing it
down as an array of bytes. How does this servlet get the film javabean ?
Well, this javabean is inside the session. So, all the servlet has to do is grab the session,
unpack the film javabean and look for the blob of the film.