Q:

Control-F5 Browser Refresh (Flash object not refreshing)

Under the hood, I was wondering what Control-F5 for a browser does.
To me, it clears the cache and refreshes images/text/controls/etc. I get that.
Question:
What about Flash objects? I've been trying to refresh a page with a Flash control and it doesn't seem to refresh to the latest. It would only refresh after I manually clear the cache.

A:

Alright so after some investigation it appears that clearing the cache with Control-F5 in IE7 does not delete/clear the xml file that the flash object reads from.
It appears to check if the file exists and if so, it will use that file instead regardless if there's a newer version.
One way to get around this was to make the browser treat each request as if it is requesting a new file and so I had to generate a random number and append it as:
In ActionScript:
var xmlPath = "/settings.xml?rand=" + getTimer();

Also, if there are flash component changes, you can also do the same by appending a random number to the flash SWF file that is being loaded.

