Disabling Dispatcher Cache for selective clients

Can dispatcher cache be disabled for selected clients?

In a recent project we ran into this scenario. We wanted to have automated testing to validate if the
content cached in the dispatcher matches with the content served from AEM.

The tricky part is that the automated test runs on a desktop which cannot directly connect to the
publish instance. The request to get the content served from AEM should also be routed through the
dispatcher.

We were looking for a solution by which the client can set a flag to indicate if the response needs to
be served from the cache or be fetched directly from AEM  
 
Query Parameter to our rescue
We handled this using a query parameter. The query parameter (we called it ignoreCache) would be
set for requests that needs to fetch the response directly from AEM.

The dispatcher configuration

Setup the /ignoreUrlParams section of dispatcher configuration to not ignore
the 'ignoreCache' parameters

/ignoreUrlParams

        #Configuration as needed

        ...

        #Add line to deny ignoreCache parameter

        /0099 { /glob "ignoreCache" /type "deny" }

With this configuration done, the dispatcher would ignore caching & serving from its cache, all the
requests with the parameter ‘ignoreCache’ included. Such requests gets passed it to an AEM
renderer instance for processing.

Now all that remains to be done is to write test cases to make two requests one with
the 'ignoreCache' parameter & another without this parameter and compare the response of these
two requests to validate the content served from AEM against the one served from dispatcher cache

Using Cookies
Another option is to set 'ignoreCache' as a cookie. But the dispatcher configuration does not support
using cookies to differentiate the requests for handling.
In this case use URL rewrite feature of Apache to fetch this cookie if set and add it as a URL
parameter before the request is passed on to the dispatcher.

Once the URL parameter is set, the ignoreUrlParams configuration kicks in to make sure that all
requests with this parameter set are fetched directly from AEM and not served from cache.