TCM54.config changes for disabling schema caching in Tridion GUI

Question

I am trying to disable the Tridion GUI browser caching for schemas in our Development environment since the changes do not reflect because of CME caching. CTRL+R OR CTRL+F5 does not helps nor does closing and re-opening browser :( The only way is to clear the browser cache everytime which makes the development very slow.

Operations which do not show up immediately:

1. Change a schema by adding or removing a field, it does not reflect immediately in the component (old ones already created or when creating a new one)
2. Create a new schema and then try to create a component, the new schema does not shows up in the schema list

To change this behavior, I've set the max-age attributes to "1" for the below in TCM54.config file:

  <cfg:cache implementation="Tridion.ContentManager.Schema" max-age="1" />
  <cfg:cache implementation="Tridion.ContentManager.ListSchemas" max-age="1" />

And did the Tridion service restart and iisreset on the CM servers, but still schema changes are not reflecting.

Ques:

1. Am I missing any additional setting that needs to be changed?
2. Also, my assumption is that the max-age attribute is in seconds. Is that correct?

Answer 1

I got answers to both of my questions from Tridion Support and now things are working as I intended. I see changes immediately after I make changes in the schema and I don't need to update config file or close and reopen the browser for changes to reflect every time. It's a one time change in TCM54. Sharing it if others run into similar issue. Here are the answers to both the questions that I asked:

1. Max Age attribute is in seconds
   
2. For the changes in TCM54.config to reflect, modify the system.config under %TRIDION_HOME%\WebUI\WebRoot\Configuration and increment the modification attribute by 1

Answer 2

There is an easier way to achieve what you want. The Tridion GUI already has support for serving versioned files, so that you don't have to worry about the browser cache. You simply have to increment the GUI version, and a fresh version of each file (with a new name) will be served to the browser, and of course all references will also be to the new name. If you are doing this a lot during a development phase you might want to run a script to do the increment. Here's an example snippet of powershell that would do it.

function incrementGuiMod {
    $configFileName = 'C:\Program Files (x86)\Tridion\web\WebUI\WebRoot\Configuration\System.config'
    $conf = [xml](get-content $configFileName)
    $mod = [int]$conf.Configuration.servicemodel.server.modification
    $mod++
    $conf.Configuration.servicemodel.server.modification = "$mod"
    $conf.Save($configFileName)
    "GUI mod is now $mod"
}
set-alias igm incrementGuiMod

With this in your $profile, all you'd need to do would be to type 'igm' each time you needed a fresh gui.