Question

There have been a couple of questions that sort of dealt with this but not covering my exact question so here we go.

For site settings, if these are stored in a database do you:

1. retrieve them from the db every time someone makes a request
2. store them in a session variable on login
3. ???????

For user specific settings do I do the same as site settings??

Any guidance/best practice would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers

Answer 1

I prefer an approach like Glomek proposes… Caching the settings in the WebCache will greatly enhance speed of access. Consider the following:

    #region Data Access  private string GetSettingsFromDb(string settingName) {     return ''; } private Dictionary<string,string> GetSettingsFromDb() {     return new Dictionary<string, string>(); }  #endregion  private const string KEY_SETTING1 = 'Setting1'; public string Setting1 {     get     {         if (Cache.Get(KEY_SETTING1) != null)             return Cache.Get(KEY_SETTING1).ToString();          Setting1 = GetSettingsFromDb(KEY_SETTING1);          return Setting1;      }      set     {         Cache.Remove(KEY_SETTING1);         Cache.Insert(KEY_SETTING1, value, null, Cache.NoAbsoluteExpiration, TimeSpan.FromHours(2));     } }  private Cache Cache { get { return HttpContext.Current.Cache; } } 

You’ll get the dynamic loading goodness, memory conservation of tossing items out of Cache after 2 hours of non-use, and the flush and reload you need when the settings are modified.