ETag question. About disable or not

[hex7c0]

Hi,

if I disable "etag" option with app.disable('etag'); and after that send a random string like res.send('ciao'); no ETag header will display. ok

but if I send a static file (still app.disable('etag');) like res.sendFile('ciao.html'); ETag header will display. Is it correct?

[dougwilson]

@raymondfeng can someone help this user?

[dougwilson]

@altsang @ritch and whoever else.

[ritch]

For a solution that works right now you can do:

res.sendFile('ciao.html', {etag: false});

Long term there are a couple issues with app.set('etag') and send. At first glance, I don't think they support the same options. This could be changed though in a couple ways.

@dougwilson what if we moved the etag utilities into a separate module and used that to handle weak, strong and other options in both express and send?

[dougwilson]

The etags in express use a checksum method to calculate the etags. send cannot do this, because if your file is 5GB, it would not be reasonable to calculate the md5 hash of other checksum from the contents.

[dougwilson]

@ritch you're welcome to submit a PR over to send if you can think of a way to calculate the same kind of ETags as express does without buffering the contents of the file in memory or reading the file twice from disk.

[ritch]

@dougwilson do you think app.set('etag', false) should default sendFile()'s options.etag to false? Perhaps overridable by sendFile(path, {etag: true})?

...and just ignore weak and strong like we are currently?

[dougwilson]

In express 5.0, maybe. It's a pretty breaking change.

[ritch]

In express 5.0, maybe. It's a pretty breaking change.

I guess the only real issue here is globally setting send to not compute etags. Maybe we can add a new setting for this? Perhaps app.set('sendFile etag', false)?

[dougwilson]

I don't know. The setting casing doesn't really fit with the others. Anyway, if you think it's a good idea, you may want to create a new issue in the repo marked as "idea" to get input from the community.

[Fishrock123]

Maybe just make the etag setting pass to send in a future breaking version?

[ritch]

Maybe just make the etag setting pass to send in a future breaking version?

#2294

[hex7c0]

thanks @ritch