Aral Balkan - Another day, another App Engine issue

Another day, another App Engine issue - solved!

Seems everyday I am discovering new issues with Google App Engine. Today, I implemented the Qik video channel for the conference, which pulls in the media RSS feed from Qik and displays the latest videos from the <head> event on Qik.

Unfortunately, Google App Engine's urlfetch api caches requests and doesn't give you a means not to cache the results or to set the cache duration (an issue that has been discussed several times on the forum too.)

For us, this means that there's an unknown delay between when you record your video and when it shows up on the video page, even though it is added to the Qik RSS immediately after it is recorded.

There is an open issue for this. Please star! Thanks!

Update: Thanks to argladd86 on the App Engine issue tracker, this problem has now been solved!

The solution involves using the max-age property, as shown below:

fetch_headers = {'Cache-Control':'no-cache,max-age=0', 'Pragma':'no-cache'}
qik_rss_result = urlfetch.fetch("http://qik.com/event/rss/397/ltheadgt-web-conference", None, urlfetch.GET, fetch_headers)

The Another day, another App Engine issue - solved! article by Aral Balkan, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 UK: England License.

Post Metadata

Date

October 6th, 2008

Author

Aral

13 Comments

Matt Giger

1

Can’t you just append a dummy request parameter like http://xxx.com/resource?dummy=193039

This is standard practice for loading images in Javascript so they don’t cache, perhaps this won’t work in your case however.

Please don’t be offended, but you should spend less time debugging Google App Engine for them or get paid for it. You can set up your own Amazon server instance with Django for $2.40/day and say goodbye to the 1000 element (or 1 megabyte) limits.
October 6th, 2008 at 11:08 pm
ibrahim

2

thank u man;)
January 17th, 2009 at 8:57 pm
kaan

3

thanks admin

http://eftelya.org
January 17th, 2009 at 11:44 pm
download-load

4

thanks
January 18th, 2009 at 12:42 am
kadir inanır

5

thank you very much
regards
February 25th, 2009 at 1:49 am
pire

6

thanx you men very good app code
February 25th, 2009 at 10:41 am
liseli gizli çekim

7

thank you
February 25th, 2009 at 11:21 am
Oyun

8

thanks a lot!
February 25th, 2009 at 12:57 pm
Of8.com

9

Thank you
February 25th, 2009 at 1:16 pm
Crazy Driver

10

thanks guys
February 25th, 2009 at 9:51 pm
fordmustang

11

http://www.fordmustanghome.com

thkx man
February 27th, 2009 at 9:56 am
Sikis

12

Bosver eftelya
June 19th, 2009 at 3:48 am
Dissertation

13

should spend less time debugging Google App Engine for them or get paid for it. You can set up your own Amazon server instance with Django for $2.40/day and say goodbye to the 1000 element
June 21st, 2009 at 11:45 am