Cache-Control and iPhone 4.1 Safari

If you want to use cookies in WebKit applications on iPhone 4.1 or earlier you will need to know about this little trick. Basically Safari for iPhone in 4.1 has caching issues with cookies and you will need to disable proxy caching and securePagesWithPragma to make those earlier browsers not have problems with cookies that you may want to use for OAuth.

Big Overview on Caching Headers

Here's the tomcat config:

<Context path="/" docBase="/root/webapps/ratecred_20110108" reloadable="true">
<Valve className="org.apache.catalina.authenticator.BasicAuthenticator"
disableProxyCaching="false" securePagesWithPragma="false"/>
</Context>

Also you ned to to check the headers generated from Apache, I found that apache was automatically setting the Cache-Control header to no-cache="set-cookie", this also cause specific problems with cookie caching in 4.1 versions of Safari on iPhone in order to accommodate this issue I would use the following command:

lwp-request -e -d http://foobar.com

This returns a list of headers for the request so I can see how apache is adding headers:

claygraham@h-34-0-36-125:~$ lwp-request -e -d http://ratecred.com
Cache-Control: no-cache="set-cookie"
Connection: Close
Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2011 05:59:33 GMT
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Content-Language: en-US
Content-Type: text/html;charset=UTF-8
Content-Type: text/html;charset=UTF-8
Client-Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2011 05:59:34 GMT
Client-Peer: 50.16.212.144:80
Client-Response-Num: 1
Client-Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Link: ; media="screen, projection"; rel="stylesheet"; type="text/css"
Link: ; media="print"; rel="stylesheet"; type="text/css"
Link: ; media="screen, projection"; rel="stylesheet"; type="text/css"
Link: ; rel="stylesheet"; type="text/css"
Link: ; /="/"; rel="stylesheet"; type="text/css"
Link: ; rel="stylesheet"; type="text/css"
Link: ; /="/"; rel="stylesheet"; type="text/css"
Link: ; /="/"; rel="shortcut icon"
Set-Cookie: JSESSIONID=73B7B4606A5F99D37378DFA21E475942; Path=/
Set-Cookie: AWSELB=3505DFB9122FAFC80483E17CBEB5E23D24546B00A71218A5BAE3B79F14317437BEAEDA7FEC501E9826163E4BE26AAE3DE36A6B6A375DB7C3AEF0E17F41A873610F8EA3D068;MAX-AGE=600
Title: RateCred Home
X-Meta-Description: RateCred Home Page, Rate places earn credit. What if you mashed up yelp, foursquare and twitter on Android phones?
X-Meta-Generator: RateCred
X-Meta-Google-Site-Verification: u9YkTj5gr6aeYBst1Aac-B_5cCvJe_Ataauqep_EwEE
X-Meta-Googlebot: index,follow
X-Meta-Refresh: 20
X-Meta-Robots: index,follow

so to modify the header I add to httpd.conf

Header unset Cache-Control
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=3600, public"