[support] anonomous users and $_Get variables

[Mark Canney]

This does seem to be a Drupal caching issue; if we press "Flush All 
Cache" and then connect anonymously, the page "GET" works correctly one 
time - but then gets "stuck" on that page.

We're not live yet, but this is an example of a dropdown which works for 
authenticated users but not anonymous users:

http://library2.lehigh.edu/content/new_books_asa

We've turned off all caching in Performance (we're version 6) but there 
still seems to be some Drupal caching occurring because this is not working.

Thank you for your generosity!

Mark

Allen Shaw wrote:
> On 08/25/2010 11:34 AM, Mark Canney wrote:
>   
>> For anonymous users, the GET variables sent in the query string are
>> ignored, ...
>> The strange thing is that this works fine for an authenticated user, ...
>>    
>>     
> Hi Mark,
>
> Are you sure the problem is specifically with $_GET vars?  Hearing only 
> what you've explained, it seems to me a more likely cause is Drupal's 
> page caching mechanism, which will save pages as static (or near-static) 
> chunks of HTML and then display those chunks until the cache is x 
> minutes old.  Such caching doesn't apply to authenticated users, though, 
> so authenticated users get each page generated completely new on each 
> request.  Anonymous users, though, would get the cached version, which 
> would be a few minutes old, at least.
>
> You might want to try again with caching turned off. In D6, you can do 
> this at admin/settings/performance in the "Page cache" section at the 
> top of the page.
>
> Let us know if that fixes the problem or not.
>
> Of course, it may just bring to light a new problem, which is: you 
> probably don't want to run with cache turned off completely, so how can 
> you do both at the same time?  I don't think you can: if you want 
> up-to-the-second dynamic data, you can't cache the stuff.
>
> But you may be able to get away with block-level caching or similarly 
> caching only the parts of the page where your dynamic data does not appear.
>
> All the best,
> Allen
>   

-- 
Mark Canney
Senior Systems Specialist
Library & Technology Services
Lehigh University
610-758-1432
mark.canney at lehigh.edu