Question

Is there a way to programmatically prime the asp.net output cache? I’ve investigated the caching API and can’t seem to find an obvious way to do this. Has anyone tried something like this? If so, what method did you use?

Answer 1

I gave some thought to this last year and ended up concluding that it was not that important for the case, but if it’s important for you website, all you have to do is to simply call the webpages from somewhere like Application_Start (after all code has run) event but you shouldn’t stop there!

The cache will eventually expire and to avoid that you should set up some way to cache the pages again before any clients requests that page.

Make the outputcache dependent on someother object in cache and set an expiration callback.

Thus, when that cache object expires, so does your pages and you should make http requests to the pages you want to recache and so on.

I’m answering to this question, but the amount of effort and question marks I still have in my mind lead me to advise not to go through with this…

UPDATE

The only kind of dependency you may set in outputcache is sql dependency. Use it if you want, but if you would need to depend your outputcache on some other business object, then this might get very difficult. I could tell you that you could set a database object and depend your database on it and expire it yourself using some kind of timer.

Man, the longer I write the more solutions and difficulties I find! I can’t write a book for something that is not worthy your precious time. Believe me you that the usefulness for this will be nearly zero.