Decent jQuery query string

Question

Can someone explain what the meaning of "_" is? This is what the violinist shows me my MVC 3 page, which has a jQuery ajax call on the client.

GET / Services / GetFoodDescriptionsLookup (100)? _ = 1291727469299 HTTP / 1.1

When the url is designed this way, I don't get any data, but if I type

GET / Services / GetFoodDescriptionsLookup (100)

it works.

Thanks Steven

Answer 1

It is added by jQuery to prevent caching when cache:false . This is basically a workaround for over-caching IE caching, which will not re-send the AJAX GET request (unless the caching policy is very well configured).