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elfield

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How to force browser to reload an applet?

Even though I've set the Netscape 4.07 and IE4.0 options to reload each time, neither browser detects that my Java applet has been updated on the server.

The applet classes are built directly into the server directories, so each time I rebuild an applet, I'd like to just hit the browser "Reload" (or "Refresh") to see the changes.  But it's necessary to restart the browser each time.

I want this just for speed of debugging -- not for the final release.

The "home" HTML page never changes, just the applet it loads.  But even when I change the date of the home page, "reload" doesn't refresh the page with the updated applet.

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance.
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Christian_Wenz

I know that Netscape does _not_ reload an applet if the HTML file it is referenced in is opened from Windows Explorer using a double click.
It may also help to put this line in your HTML page:
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Pragma" CONTENT="no-cache">
or, try another browser like opera (operasoftware.com), install Sun's Java plugin and then hope for the best :-)
You can also put in
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Expires" CONTENT="Tue, 20 Aug 1996 14:25:27 GMT">

or some other date that has already passed and all browsers should refresh it every time. The pragma-no-cache is not universally supported.

I don't know if this will solve your problem though.

From my experience the best thing to do is close and reopen the browser.
For Netscape: press SHIFT while giving reload command. This the only reason that I prefer NS over IE(3) for debugging applets if I need to use a browser for it.
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ASKER

vendrig's suggestion (SHIFT-Reload) worked -- Thanks.

I tried the others without success,  but I may not have done them correctly.

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ASKER

Dear Vendrig,

Your comment  worked.  Please "answer" the question so I can grade it.

Thanks.
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vendrig

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BTW: it also works in frames, i.e. press SHIFT while you do a frame reload via rightmouse-click menu. Saved me some time in some applications...
weird - I always use shift-reload, but I've never seen any effect on applets.
Well, I know from experience it works for 3 and 4.0. I don't know about 4.5 and newer.