OpenLayers not requesting tiles at previously visited zoom levels

Question

I have a web app with Maps on several pages using OpenLayers as a client and GeoServer as a backend. The layers are WMS tiles.

On one page, if you visit it, and go to several zoom levels (of the WMS Tile layer),

and then say go into GeoServer and change the styling on that layer.

Then come back to this page, the style will not change for these zoom levels, and watching the browser requests, requests do not occurr at previously visited zoom levels.

I have Response Cached Headers OFF, Tile Caching OFF on the Layer.

Why is the request not being sent? Note the web pages are asp.net, requested via AJAX.

Answer 1

Try adding a dummy timestamp parameter to the WMS call in OpenLayers which should be ignored by the server but will stop browsers caching tiles, for example:

params: {
    'VERSION': '1.1.1',
    'LAYERS': 'osm_auto:all',
    'TIMESTAMP': new Date().getTime()
},

If you need to reset while a page is loaded use code such as

layers[0].getSource().updateParams({'TIMESTAMP': new Date().getTime()});