JSP forward issue

Question

I have a web application deployed on weblogic 8 server. I have a jsp (AddNewUser.jsp) which forwards to a servlet (CreateUserServlet.class) with the following code :
<jsp:forward page="/admin/CreateUser?userID=new"/>In the CreateUserServlet class, I have overriden init(config) as follows:
public void init(ServletConfig config)throws ServletException {
         super.init(config);
        context = config.getServletContext();
}In the doPost method, I have some debug statements as follows:
public void doPost(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response) {
System.err.println("--------CreateUserServlet start------- ");
//initialization code here    
context.getRequestDispatcher("/WEB-INF/jsps/admin/createUser.jsp").forward(request, response);
}The flow of actions is :
1. User clicks on a link to AddNew.jsp which forwards to the CreateUserServlet
2. The servlet performs some initialization (not shown) and forwards to createUser.jsp page
3. The createUser.jsp page contains a form which the user fills and clicks "save".
4. The form calls another servlet which saves the new user to the database.
The problem now which I have is that the web application works perfectly on 4-5 test machines except for the client ( what luck huh?). For him this is what happens
1. He clicks on a link to AddNew.jsp, he gets forwarded to the createUser.jsp page (as expected..no problem here!)
2. He enters some data and clicks "save" and the new user gets saved to the database.(as expected..no problem here!)
3. Now, when he tries repeating by clicking on the link to AddNew.jsp page, the debug statement "--------CreateUserServlet start------- " does not get printed to the console!!(HERE IS THE PROBLEM!) but he still gets forwarded to the createUser.jsp page! This is creating a problem because my initialization code is being skipped.
So, the client is able to enter a new user the first time he visits the section but is not able to add thereafter.
Any clues please?

Answer 1

I wonder if what is happening is when he clicks the link to AddNew.jsp teh browser is pulling the page out of cache. That would explain why he gets the CreateUser form without hitting the CreateUserServlet.
It is easy enough to check by enabling the access logs for your server. Then when he clicks on the link check the log to see if the request was recieved on the server and teh responce code is 304
If it is a caching problem there are pleanty of examples of the HTML meta data tags to prevent cahcing on the forum if you search for them.