Question

I have a List of objects in an asp.net page. when the page loads in the browser for the first time, I fetch data from the database, create objects with those data and populate the list. All these are done inside the page load event handler. Now when the page is posted back to the page, the previous list is gone, since the variables were all freed.

How can I cache that List, so that when this page is posted back, all my objects are available?

Answer 1

As @Eilon asked, is this data user-specific or is it site specific?

If the data is user specific you can use the Session State to store it, however it will expire when the users session ends, and in some cases can still invoke a roundtrip to your database server (if for instance it is backed by SQL server instead of being in-proc, etc).

If the data is application wide you can also use the Application Cache. It is site wide, resides in the process domain and is therefore available to everyone who has sessions on that server. Special care must be taken when using this in a multi-server scenario, but it is easily doable.

It should be noted that the Application Cache (and any other global setup) can make your app load slow for the first user to hit the site if the setup takes time. IIS7 and ASP.NET have attempted to address this with a module released recently that periodically wakes your app up to ensure that the global cache is either pre-populated, or remains alive.