I’m building a web system and various clients will have alternate text for default instances throughout the site. One place is the main nav but there are others. The default may be “project” but they may want to call it “event”.
I’m heading down the road of calling all the terminology settings (there’s a list of about 15) and creating an ArrayList that has the id and either the default or their replacement as the items in the ArrayList.
I’ve also got a enum key list called TermKey that has the defaults and the corresponding ID number.
Throughout the code I’ll reference TermKey.Project and then do one of these things that I see as options.
1-pull the text from the session (if the client has set it to “event” then the text “event” will be waiting for the call there)
2-pull the text from the database every time I need it.
3-pull the client’s list each time a page loads.
Some thoughts on the impact each way or if there is a best practice for this sort of thing would be appreciated.
If this is specific to each user, you might as well use session. Don’t overuse is (and only use it for small amounts of data).
Going to the database for each request can be overkill, especially if this data doesn’t change often – it will be much faster to retrieve from local memory than from over the network.
Having said that, using session InProc will limit you to a single server and will not allow you to scale to a web farm.