Question

I have one action has these attributes:

  [OutputCache(Location = System.Web.UI.OutputCacheLocation.Server, Duration = 300, VaryByParam = "*")]

and another with

  [OutputCache(Location = System.Web.UI.OutputCacheLocation.None)]

and they both use the same View.

In the View, or even in the Action Method, how to I determine what the caching is? i.e. is it a cached page or not? I’ve tried looking at Response.Headers (only has “Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.0), & Response.CacheControl is “private” in both cases.

Answer 1

I haven’t used this in the application, but for the sake of seeing if it’s possible, I’ve done this sample… using Reflection, and a base controller, and calling Initialize() from my action method, the following code gets the OutputCache attributes from the calling method. Then a View or Partial View can get the cache location from the ViewBag.

public class BaseController : Controller
{
    public void Initialize()
    {
        var stackTrace = new StackTrace();

        if (stackTrace.FrameCount >= 1)
        {
            var methodBase = stackTrace.GetFrame(1).GetMethod();

            var filters = (OutputCacheAttribute[])methodBase.GetCustomAttributes(typeof(OutputCacheAttribute), false);

            if (filters.Length > 0)
            {
                ViewBag.CacheLocation = filters[0].Location;
            }
        }
    }
}