Question

I have a page with the following caching defined:

<%@ OutputCache Duration="60" VaryByParam="None" %>

I have a user control inside that page that i don’t want cached. How can I turn it off just for that control?

Answer 1

Option One

Use the Substitution control or API on your page. this enables you to cache everything on your page except the part contained within the substitution control.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms227429.aspx

One nice way to use this is to implement your control as a simple server control which renders the html as a string, but does so in the context of the page (that is with the correct Client IDs). Scott Guthrie has a really nice example of how this works. Works nicely with AJAX calls too by the way…

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2006/10/22/Tip_2F00_Trick_3A00_-Cool-UI-Templating-Technique-to-use-with-ASP.NET-AJAX-for-non_2D00_UpdatePanel-scenarios.aspx

Excerpt from Scott Gu’s article…

    [WebMethod]
    public string GetCustomersByCountry(string country)
    {
       CustomerCollection customers = DataContext.GetCustomersByCountry(country);

        if (customers.Count > 0)
            //RenderView returns the rendered HTML in the context of the callback
            return ViewManager.RenderView("customers.ascx", customers);
        else
            return ViewManager.RenderView("nocustomersfound.ascx");
    }

Option Two

Render the dynamic control via an AJAX call on the page load. This way, you can safely cache the entire page (including the AJAX call) and it is only the rendered result of the call that changes between pages.