Open Radar

 
Summary:
NSURLRequestUseProtocolCachePolicy is the default cache policy used by NSURLRequest. The documentation for NSURLRequestUseProtocolCachePolicy states that it follows the process documented in http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec13.html#sec13.2.

Unfortunately, section 13.2.4 of this documentation (http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec13.html#sec13.2.4) does not cover what happens when a server does not provide expiration details as a part of its response to the client. What it says instead is:

"If none of Expires, Cache-Control: max-age, or Cache-Control: s- maxage (see section 14.9.3) appears in the response, and the response does not include other restrictions on caching, the cache MAY compute a freshness lifetime using a heuristic."

The caching behavior in this instance is not documented for NSURLRequest. Empirical evidence from furious users suggests that the data is cached for somewhere between 4 and 24 hours, but not indefinitely.

Steps to Reproduce:
N/A

Expected Results:
Documentation would at least describe how long data is cached in an absence of server-defined expiration data and display this information prominently along with the enumeration comments.

Actual Results:
I have not found anything or anyone that can state how long this data is cached.

Regression:
N/A

Notes:
Ow.