Question

I need to fill some dropdown boxex from some reference data. i.e City List, Country List etc. I need to fill it in various webforms. I think, we should cache this data in our application so that, we don’t hit database on every form. I am new to caching and ASP.Net. Please suggest me how to do this.

Answer 1

I always add the following class to all my projects which give me easy access to the Cache object. Implementing this, following Hasan Khan’s answer would be a good way to go.

public static class CacheHelper
    {
        /// <summary>
        /// Insert value into the cache using
        /// appropriate name/value pairs
        /// </summary>
        /// <typeparam name="T">Type of cached item</typeparam>
        /// <param name="o">Item to be cached</param>
        /// <param name="key">Name of item</param>
        public static void Add<T>(T o, string key, double Timeout)
        {
            HttpContext.Current.Cache.Insert(
                key,
                o,
                null,
                DateTime.Now.AddMinutes(Timeout),
                System.Web.Caching.Cache.NoSlidingExpiration);
        }

        /// <summary>
        /// Remove item from cache
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="key">Name of cached item</param>
        public static void Clear(string key)
        {
            HttpContext.Current.Cache.Remove(key);
        }

        /// <summary>
        /// Check for item in cache
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="key">Name of cached item</param>
        /// <returns></returns>
        public static bool Exists(string key)
        {
            return HttpContext.Current.Cache[key] != null;
        }

        /// <summary>
        /// Retrieve cached item
        /// </summary>
        /// <typeparam name="T">Type of cached item</typeparam>
        /// <param name="key">Name of cached item</param>
        /// <param name="value">Cached value. Default(T) if item doesn't exist.</param>
        /// <returns>Cached item as type</returns>
        public static bool Get<T>(string key, out T value)
        {
            try
            {
                if (!Exists(key))
                {
                    value = default(T);
                    return false;
                }

                value = (T)HttpContext.Current.Cache[key];
            }
            catch
            {
                value = default(T);
                return false;
            }

            return true;
        }
    }