Where should caching occur in an ASP.NET MVC application?

Question

I\'m needing to cache some data using System.Web.Caching.Cache. Not sure if it matters, but the data does not come from a database, but a plethora of custom obj

Answer 1

I think it ultimately depends on what you are caching. If you want to cache the result of rendered pages, that is tightly coupled to the Http nature of the request, and would suggest a ActionFilter level caching mechanism.

If, on the other hand, you want to cache the data that drives the pages themselves, then you should consider model level caching. In this case, the controller doesn't care when the data was generated, it just performs the logic operations on the data and prepares it for viewing. Another argument for model level caching is if you have other dependencies on the model data that are not attached to your Http context.

For example, I have a web-app were most of my Model is abstracted into a completely different project. This is because there will be a second web-app that uses this same backing, AND there's a chance we might have a non-web based app using the same data as well. Much of my data comes from web-services, which can be performance killers, so I have model level caching that the controllers and views know absolutely nothing about.