Basic Concepts

django-html5-appcache leverages django cache, test and signals frameworks to browse project urls and assets and generate an appcache manifest file.

Manifest file generation

The manifest file is generated collecting all the cached urls and exploring them using the test client to extract asset urls and including them in the manifest itself.

As this can be quite resource intensive, the manifest file is saved in the project cache; the view that actually delivers the file manifest to the browser can thus use the project cache to serve it with no performance impact.

The manifest file can be generated out-of-band using a django command, to execute the command manually or in a cron job, or using Web interface (since version 0.3.0).

Cache invalidation

Whenever a registered model is saved or deleted (see Enabling caching in your application on how to enable this for your application), manifest cache is marked as dirty; this has no immediate effect on the manifest file served, as the oudated copy is still served.

To actually refresh the manifest file served to users, it’s necessary to regenerate it (see above).

URL discovery

Using sitemap

django-html5-appcache uses the sitemap as a primary mean to discover urls in the web application.

This is a two steps process:

1. get the sitemap and extract the urls declared
2. scrape each url and extract the asset urls

In the scraping phase, the actual HTML of each page is generated and analyed.

Currently django-html5-appcache extracts data from img, script and link tags. See AppCacheAssetsFromResponse for more in depth details.

See In the Markup on how to customize the assets extraction in your markup.

Customizing urls

Additional to the sitemap method above, you can define your own custom url list; in this case, it’s your duty to define the list of assets in those urls.