Force SquishIt to refresh/recreate minified files

Question

Am looking to integrate SquishIt with our webapp. What I have noticed from the testing locally is, SquishIt generates the file only once. Based on other SO answers and reading the SquishIt code I gather that the file generation happens if the HttpCache doesn't contain a value of the generated hashed key.

If without restarting the app, or without clearing the HttpCache, if I delete the generated minified file, then SquishIt doesn't recreate the file.

Is there any way to force SquishIt to recreate the file, if it doesn't exist?

Earlier we were using RequestReduce and we noticed the it didn't always pick up css/js changes if only the css/js files were edited (ie, web.config was not edited and the app was not restarted). To ensure that the changes are picked up, we always delete all generated files when deploying.

1. Will SquishIt ALWAYS detect the changed code, even if web.config is not modified, the app is not restarted and the HttpCache is not cleared?

   The [BundleCache.Add] (https://github.com/jetheredge/SquishIt/blob/master/SquishIt.Framework/BundleCache.cs#L40-54) method's code helps answer this question

2. Can I force SquishIt to generated files by simply deleting the generated files?

   After thinking about the scenario I need to handle, this is the wrong question to ask.

EDIT:

1. What are the cache headers sent to the client for these generated files?

My scenario is as follows. I switched from the default JS minifier to JsMinMinifier. After deleting the files (RenderOnlyIfOutputFileIsMissing is set) and restarting the app, the minified files got generated. However, they had the same name as the previous files (I wrongly assumed it would have a different name).

Refreshing my browser showed that the newly generated files were sent by the server. How did this happen? If the assets had a long expiration cache header set on them, then the browser shouldn't have requested the new file from the server. (Inspecting the assets in Firebug, I am unable to understand the cache policy. To me it looks like it's set to cache for a couple of mins).

EDIT 2:

My take away is, there is no need to delete the generated file to cause regeneration. If the corresponding source files change, SquishIt WILL generate an appropriate file.

Answer 1

1. It should - we are adding cache dependencies for source files (not the generated ones) so if one of them is edited the entry in the bundle cache should be invalidated. See BundleCache.Add

2. No - once an entry is in the bundle cache we assume the output file will be there, so you'd end up with the file not being found. This is by design, we haven't really heard a compelling case against it.

Deleting generated files when deploying should be fine though, even if not strictly necessary - don't you need to restart the app then anyway?

If you are really concerned about files lingering you may want to consider using SquishIt without the file system