Question

Using Awesomium.NET 1.7 RC3, if I create a WebSession and a WebView in my application like so:

var webSession = 
    WebCore.CreateWebSession("C:\\AwCache", new WebPreferences{...});
var webView = 
    WebCore.CreateWebView(500, 500, webSession);

…and then exit the app, will the cached data (images, css etc.) be available the next time my app starts and creates a WebSession using the same location for the cache?

Answer 1

I believe the cache will still be available. While most of my experience with caching was in Awesomium 1.6.6 and was done by setting the WebCoreConfig.UserDataPath property when calling WebCore.Initialize(), a little testing hints that it is still available.

If you look at the files created when you first run your code and access a web page (I chose Flickr just so there would be a reasonable amount of images on the page), you’ll see that inside your AwCache folder, there’s another folder called ‘Cache’. This folder contains 4 ‘data_X’ files, an index file and a number of ‘f_XXXXXX’ files. One other thing worth noting is how quickly those files are generated on the first app run. When you rerun the app, no new files are created as long as you’re visiting the same URL, but the time stamp on the data_X files, the index files, and maybe a couple of the f_X files get updated, but many f_X files remain the same. The file changes also happen very quickly.

I believe the f_X files are the actual cached items from the site, as visiting a different site will result in an increasing number of f_X files, while revisiting the same site will not.

Obviously, this is far from a matter-of-fact answer, but based on these observations, I think it seems apparent that the cache is maintained. One final piece, if you look at the Awesomium 1.7 documentation, CreateWebSession(WebPreferences) specifies in bold that it is in-memory cache, where the CreateWebSession(string, WebPreferences) method that you are calling does not.