Generating an Etag based on body in mod_perl

Question

I have some old mod_perl code that generates dynamic content. I was asked to implement sending an Etag on each reply.

It seems the way to do this might be to add a mod_perl handler, but this content is generated dynamically, so I need to make the Etag a checksum of the response body. I have yet not found a way to get the contents of the response body in a mod_perl handler to checksum it.

How should I dynamically generate Etags based on the response body in mod_perl?

Answer 1

If your content is dynamically generated then probably the easiest way to set the etags to totally random numbers. (And this is also the safest way...)

Or maybe you can create a heuristic like creating a hash from the url/get/post parameters. If you can't create this kind of heuristic it means that your internal logic is based on other internal states. (session/etc) So probably the total random etags are the best solution.