Question

I’m trying to cache the output of an ApiController method in Web API.

Here’s the controller code:

public class TestController : ApiController
{
    [OutputCache(Duration = 10, VaryByParam = "none", Location = OutputCacheLocation.Any)]
    public string Get()
    {
        return System.DateTime.Now.ToString();
    }
}

N.B. I’d also tried the OutputCache attribute on the controller itself, as well as several combinations of its parameters.

The route is registered in Global.asax:

namespace WebApiTest
{
    public class Global : HttpApplication
    {
        protected void Application_Start(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
            RouteTable.Routes.MapHttpRoute("default", routeTemplate: "{controller}");
        }
    }
}

I get a successful response, but it’s not cached anywhere:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Cache-Control: no-cache
Pragma: no-cache
Content-Type: application/xml; charset=utf-8
Expires: -1
Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.5
X-AspNet-Version: 4.0.30319
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
Date: Wed, 18 Jul 2012 17:56:17 GMT
Content-Length: 96

<string xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/2003/10/Serialization/">18/07/2012 18:56:17</string>

I was not able to find documentation for output caching in Web API.

Is this a limitation of the Web API in MVC4 or am I doing something wrong?

Answer 1

WebAPI does not have any built in support for the [OutputCache] attribute. Take a look at this article to see how you could implement this feature yourself.