Error Message When Using Templates With AJAX Based Navigation

If you are using a Magento theme that has AJAX based navigation, it is possible that you will encounter an error when trying to navigate to certain pages. This can be caused by your browser receiving the wrong cached response as a result of the way your template handles AJAX requests.

For example: Let's assume that your current URL is something like “your_site_url.html” and you are looking at page one. By visiting this page, the HTML response is now cached by LiteMage using it's URL. You then click on the second page which will be an AJAX call, the JSON response is also cached by LiteMage using it's URL.

Now say you want to click on your current page (page 2) again. You would assume that the cached JSON response for page 2 would be returned, but the URL used for requesting the current page is:

your_site_url.html#

Which your browser will interpret as “your_site_url.html”, thereby requesting the previously cached copy of page 1 instead. This happens because both requests are pointing to the same cached URL, so whatever is cached first will be returned.

You can fix this easily by modifying your theme's template with a single line change as we do below for the example sm_market theme (located under app/design/frontend/sm_market/default/template/page/html/pager.phtml):

Note: The sm_market theme appends additional information to the end of a URL to notify the back-end when it wants to make an AJAX request. For example, an AJAX request for page 2 of “test.html” would become “test.html?p=2&isLayerAjax=1” when using the sm_market theme. This appended information will vary from theme to theme.

Original

<?php foreach ($this->getFramePages() as $_page): ?>
         <?php if ($this->isPageCurrent($_page)): ?>
              <li class="current"><a href="#" onclick="javascript:void(0);"><?php echo $_page ?></a></li>
         <?php else: ?>
              <li class=""><a href="<?php echo $this->getPageUrl($_page) ?>"><?php echo $_page ?></a></li>
         <?php endif;?>
<?php endforeach;?>
      

Modified

<?php foreach ($this->getFramePages() as $_page): ?>
    <?php if ($this->isPageCurrent($_page)): ?>
        <li class="current"><a href="<?php echo $this->getPageUrl($_page) ?>"><?php echo $_page ?></a></li>
    <?php else: ?>
        <li class=""><a href="<?php echo $this->getPageUrl($_page) ?>"><?php echo $_page ?></a></li>
    <?php endif;?>
<?php endforeach;?>
      

Which will now ensure that the full page URL is used for each page request. This guarantees that each HTML and AJAX request will have their own unique URL and therefore, their own unique cached copies.