Altering response based on content-type

[Trond Michelsen]

On Mon, Sep 25, 2006 at 08:17:19AM +0000, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
> In message <20060925075916.GK13253 at crusaders.no>, Trond Michelsen writes:
>> I'm using Varnish as a cache for a WMS service, and this service will
>> occasionally time out on a request. If it does it will return either
>> an image with an error message, or an XML-file with the
>> error-message. Unfortunately, both responses return the status code
>> 200 OK.
>> The webclient doesn't handle the XML-response very well, and I don't
>> want Varnish to cache the images containing error messages.
>> So - is it possible to get Varnish to return a default image if the
>> response from the server is an XML-file?
> There are no headers we can detect instead ?

If the requests asks for errors to be inline, then no. The response
headers are exactly the same for a successful request as for an
unsuccessful one. In fact the program returns only the bare minimum of
headers. In both a successful and an unsuccsessful request, headers
look like this:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Mon, 25 Sep 2006 08:42:46 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.33 (Debian GNU/Linux) AxKit/1.62 mod_perl/1.29
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: image/png

However, the client can ask for error messages to be returned in one
of three formats:

- application/vnd.ogc.se_xml

In this case, the content-type of the response will be
"application/vnd.ogc.se_xml", so this should be detectable.

- application/vnd.ogc.se_inimage

This will return an image with the error message
embedded. Content-type will be image/png (or whatever format the
client requested).

- application/vnd.ogc.se_blank

This one is actually a bit interesting. I didn't know about it until
right now, and this image will always be of the same size (142 bytes
for PNG), and initial tests indicates that it is different from any of
the blank tiles generated from the mapserver. 

So that would give me another option, which probably is simpler. Set
obj.ttl to 0s if its size is 142 bytes. Is that possible? 

-- 
Trond Michelsen