NAME

WWW::Mechanize::Cached - Cache response to be polite

VERSION

version 1.40

SYNOPSIS

use WWW::Mechanize::Cached; 

        my $cacher = WWW::Mechanize::Cached->new;
        $cacher->get( $url );

        # or, with your own Cache object
        use CHI;
        use WWW::Mechanize::Cached;
    
        my $cache = CHI->new(
            driver   => 'File',
            root_dir => '/tmp/mech-example'
        );
    
        my $mech = WWW::Mechanize::Cached->new( cache => $cache );
        $mech->get("http://www.google.com");

DESCRIPTION

Uses the Cache::Cache hierarchy to implement a caching Mech. This lets one perform repeated requests without hammering a server impolitely.

Repository: <http://github.com/oalders/www-mechanize-cached/tree/master>

CONSTRUCTOR
new
Behaves like, and calls, WWW::Mechanize's "new" method. Any params, other than those explicitly listed here are passed directly to WWW::Mechanize's constructor.

You may pass in a "cache => $cache_object" if you wish. The $cache_object must have "get()" and "set()" methods like the "Cache::Cache" family.

The default Cache object is set up with the following params: 

        my $cache_params = {
            default_expires_in => "1d", namespace => 'www-mechanize-cached',
        };
    
        $cache = Cache::FileCache->new( $cache_params );

This should be fine if you only want to use a disk-based cache, you only want to cache results for 1 day and you're not in a shared hosting environment. If any of this presents a problem for you, you should pass in your own Cache object. These defaults will remain unchanged in order to maintain backwards compatibility.

For example, you may want to try something like this: 

        use WWW::Mechanize::Cached;
        use CHI;
    
        my $cache = CHI->new(
            driver   => 'File',
            root_dir => '/tmp/mech-example'
        );
    
        my $mech = WWW::Mechanize::Cached->new( cache => $cache );
        $mech->get("http://www.google.com");

METHODS

Most methods are provided by WWW::Mechanize. See that module's documentation for details.

cache( $cache_object )
Requires an caching object which has a get() and a set() method. Using the CHI module to create your cache is the recommended way. See new() for examples.

is_cached()
Returns true if the current page is from the cache, or false if not. If it returns "undef", then you don't have any current request.

positive_cache( 0|1 )
As of v1.36 positive caching is enabled by default. Up to this point, this module had employed a negative cache, which means it cached 404 responses, temporary redirects etc. In most cases, this is not what you want, so the default behaviour now better reflects this. You can revert to the negative cache quite easily: 

        # cache everything (404s, all 300s etc)
        $mech->positive_cache( 0 );

ref_in_cache_key( 0|1 )
Allow the referring URL to be used when creating the cache key. This is off by default. In almost all cases, you will not want to enable this, but it is available to you for reasons of backwards compatibility and giving you enough rope to hang yourself.

Previous to v1.36 the following was in the "BUGS AND LIMITATIONS"

section
        It may sometimes seem as if it's not caching something. And this may well
        be true. It uses the HTTP request, in string form, as the key to the cache
        entries, so any minor changes will result in a different key. This is most
        noticable when following links as L<WWW::Mechanize> adds a C<Referer>
        header.

See RT #56757 for a detailed example of the bugs this functionality can trigger.

THANKS

Iain Truskett for writing this in the first place.

SUPPORT

You can find documentation for this module with the perldoc command.

perldoc WWW::Mechanize::Cached

You can also look for information at:

SEE ALSO

WWW::Mechanize.

AUTHORS

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

This software is copyright (c) 2010 by Iain Truskett and Andy Lester.

This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as the Perl 5 programming language system itself.