Question

I’m developing a blog application shared by non-profit organizations. I want each organization to be able to change their own blog settings. I have taken a singleton pattern (from BlogEngine.net) and modified it. (I understand that it is no longer a singleton pattern.) I have tested this approach and it seems to work fine in a development environment. Is this pattern a good practice? Are there issues, which may arise when this is placed in a production environment?

public class UserBlogSettings
    {
    private UserBlogSettings()
    {
        Load();
    }

    public static UserBlogSettings Instance
    {
            get
            {
                string cacheKey = "UserBlogSettings-" + HttpContext.Current.Session["userOrgName"].ToString();
                object cacheItem = HttpRuntime.Cache[cacheKey] as UserBlogSettings;
                if (cacheItem == null)
                {
                    cacheItem = new UserBlogSettings();
                    HttpRuntime.Cache.Insert(cacheKey, cacheItem, null, DateTime.Now.AddMinutes(1),
                                             Cache.NoSlidingExpiration);
                }
                return (UserBlogSettings) cacheItem;
            }
    }
}    

(Portions of code were omitted for brevity.)

Thanks for any help, comment, etc.

Answer 1

If its per session, store it in the Session and not in the Cache.

Also, you’re upcasting and downcasting for no reason here:

object cacheItem = HttpRuntime.Cache[cacheKey] as UserBlogSettings;

this removes the unneeded casts

UserBlogSettings cacheItem = HttpRuntime.Cache[cacheKey] as UserBlogSettings;
if (cacheItem == null)
{
    cacheItem = new UserBlogSettings();
    HttpRuntime.Cache.Insert(cacheKey, cacheItem, null, 
                         DateTime.Now.AddMinutes(1),
                         Cache.NoSlidingExpiration);
}
return cacheItem;