Question

I have implemented a diskbased cache and would also like to enable it to outputcache usercontrols as well. I have read that I cannot use the diskbased outputcache provider for usercontrols but only to outputcache entire pages.

Is it possible to outputcache the usercontrol to disk in some other way or to some other storagetype (db) ?

thanks
Thomas

Answer 1

ASP.Net 4.0 added output cache extensibility. You do this by creating an output cache provider. In the words of Scott Gu,

Output-cache providers can use any storage mechanism to persist output cached content. This makes it possible to easily create output-cache providers that store the cached content using any persistence mechanism – including local or remote disks, databases, cloud storage, and distributed cache engines (like memcached or velocity).

You create an output cache provider by subclassing the
OutputCacheProvider base class.

Once you have created the cache provider, you can register it in your web.config file:

<caching>
  <outputCache defaultProvider="MyCustomCacheProvider">
    <providers>
      <add name="MyCustomCacheProvider" type="CustomCacheProvider" />
      </providers>
    </outputCache>
</caching>

When you put an OutputCache directive on your user control’s ascx page:

<%@ OutputCache Duration="120" VaryByParam="None" %>

you should be able to use this custom cache provider for your user control.

For more information, see Scott Gu’s excellent blog post.