MVC HTML.RenderAction – Error: Duration must be a positive number

Question

On my website I want the user to have the ability to login/logout from any page. When the user select login button a modal dialog will be present to the user for him to enter i

Answer 1

In some cases it may be appropriate to just create a second action method, with caching disabled that is called by your primary action.

    /// Use this for normal HTTP requests which need to be cached
    [OutputCache(CacheProfile = "Script")]
    public ContentResult Foo(string id)
    {
        return _Foo(id);
    }

    /// Use this for Html.Action
    public ContentResult _Foo(string id)
    {
        return View();
    }

When you need Html.Action you just call _Foo instead of Foo.

@Html.Action("_Foo", "Bar").ToString();

You can then rely on the parent page to do the caching.

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Another way is to just bypass the whole 'CacheProfile' thing for ActionMethod and use my 'DonutCacheAttribute' instead.

The 'CacheProfile' for ActionMethods currently only respects the Duration and varyByParam properties - and this method makes it easy to set different caching durations in debug vs. deployment (assuming you're using XDT transformations).