[5.x]: GraphQL cache headers are set to 1 year for data that should never be cached

[MatthiasBrodelet]

What happened?

Description

We use the graphQL api to fetch all products from Craft Commerce.
This request gets a cache header of a year while the data is already stale after a few hours.
This means that customers are seeing wrong data.

enableGraphqlCaching is set to false.

Steps to reproduce

1. Go to https://www.the-house.be/nl/kopen/goud/beursmunten
2. Look at the graphql request cache header

Expected behavior

The cache should be invalidated when some data has changed in the commerce products. Or it should not cache at all...

Actual behavior

It caches the data for a year.

Craft CMS version

5.9.2

PHP version

8.2

Operating system and version

No response

Database type and version

No response

Image driver and version

No response

Installed plugins and versions

[linear]

CMS-1801

[MatthiasBrodelet]

I have temporarily worked around it by adding a timestamp parameter to the graphql request for cache busting.
I also commented out line 235 and 236 in GraphqlController.php in the vendor folder for the CMS.
We really do not want it to keep caching this since it changes every minute...

[brandonkelly]

I’m seeing Cache-Control: no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate in the response headers for the https://www.the-house.be/graphqlapi XHR request on that page.

In any case, you can force a GraphQL request to not be cached by passing an X-Craft-Gql-Cache: no-cache header in your XHR request. That will both disable enableGraphqlCaching for that request (which is only concerned with backend caching), and sets a Cache-Control: no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate header on the response.

[MatthiasBrodelet]

I’m seeing Cache-Control: no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate in the response headers for the https://www.the-house.be/graphqlapi XHR request on that page.

Because I have commented out a line in GraphqlController.php that sets these cache headers as I have mentioned in my previous comment.

[brandonkelly]

Sorry, missed that. You can safely uncomment those lines if you start including an X-Craft-Gql-Cache: no-cache header in your GraphQL requests.

[MatthiasBrodelet]

@brandonkelly That works. Thanks!

[MatthiasBrodelet]

@brandonkelly What exactly is the reason for this change to cache all GraphQL queries for a year by default?
This breaks all our websites where we use GraphQL for filtering on overview pages since those results get cached now.
We now not only have to add the no cache header but also a timestamp to the request to cache bust because people that have visited the page in the past and still have that request cached still see the old cached response.

When I have an overview page with 12 bikes, that graphql request gets cached.
Then I add another bike in the CMS but I will never see that bike on the website unless I clear my cache since that request was cached.
I understand this from a performance perspective, but it will always serve stale data.
So what is the point?

[brandonkelly]

Which change are you referring to? I don’t think anything changed recently related to this.

[MatthiasBrodelet]

I can't really pinpoint it to a specific commit to be honest.
What we see is that sites running Craft CMS 5.8.17 and use GraphQL (without the X-Craft-Gql-Cache: no-cache header) have no cache headers on the request while they suddenly start having cache headers for a year when updating to Craft CMS 5.9.

It's not the end of the world of course.
I am just afraid we will forget to add the no cache header in the future for a new project and run into this issue all over again where clients make changes to the content but they still see the old content while others see the new content.

[brandonkelly]

Sorry, it’s been 6 months so I just completely forgot that we did intentionally change the behavior in 5.9. (a920940)

Looking into making the duration configurable…