Angular get image from Spring RestController and cache it

Question

I have a Client-Server application using SpringBoot and Angular2. I would like to load a image from the server by filename. This works fine.

I store the attribute image:string at the client and I place it in the template again. You might pay attention to return res.url; ; I do not use the actual ressource, which might be wrong.

My objective is that image is cached. To my understanding the web-browser can automatically cache the images. Correct? But the caching does not work yet and maybe somebody could give me a hint what needs to be adjusted? Is a different header required?

Server (SpringBoot)

public class ImageRestController {
    @RequestMapping(value = "/getImage/{filename:.+}", method = RequestMethod.GET)
    public ResponseEntity<Resource> getImage(@PathVariable String filename) {

        try {
            String path = Paths.get(ROOT, filename).toString();
            Resource loader = resourceLoader.getResource("file:" + path);
            return new ResponseEntity<Resource>(loader, HttpStatus.OK);
        } catch (Exception e) {
            return new ResponseEntity<Resource>(HttpStatus.NOT_FOUND);
        }
    }
}   

Client (Angular2)

@Component({
  selector: 'my-image',
  template: `
    <img src="{{image}}"/>
  `
})

export class MyComponent {

  image:string;
  constructor(private service:MyService) {}

  showImage(filename:string) {
    this.service.getImage(filename)
      .subscribe((file) => {
          this.image = file;
        });
      }
}

export class MyService() {
  getImage(filename:String):Observable<any> {
    return this.http.get(imagesUrl + "getImage/" + filename)
      .map(this.extractUrl)
      .catch(this.handleError);
  }
  extractUrl(res:Response):string {
    return res.url;
  }
}

Answer 1

You could do something like this on the server side (and perhaps add an ETag or Last-Modified header if you can get that information):

return ResponseEntity
            .ok()
            .cacheControl(CacheControl.maxAge(30, TimeUnit.DAYS))
            .body(loader);

See the HTTP caching part of the reference documentation in Spring .

If you're just serving resources and not applying any additional logic, then you'd better do the following:

@Configuration
public class WebConfig extends WebMvcConfigurerAdapter {

    @Override
    public void addResourceHandlers(ResourceHandlerRegistry registry) {
        registry.addResourceHandler("/getImage/**")
                .addResourceLocations("classpath:/path/to/root/")
                .setCacheControl(CacheControl.maxAge(1, TimeUnit.DAYS).cachePublic());
    }

}

See the other relevant part of the reference documentation . You can also apply transformations and leverage cache busting ( see this section as well ).