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

Here are the fixes for this issue. http://thenullreference.com/blog/fixing-the-asp-net-mvc-3-outputcacheattribute-for-partial-views-to-honor-some-web-config-settings/

Answer 2

Adding my comment as answer:

Hmm, that's weird. By reading your question I am ready to bet 5 bucks that you have caching enabled somehow. Try renaming the action, controller. Make sure that the action you are calling is not decorated with the [OutputCache] attribute. Try doing this in a new project that you start from scratch. I am sure you will be able to narrow it down.

Answer 3

I got around the problem by creating a custom OutputCache attribute, that manually loads the Duration, VarByCustom and VarByParam from the profile:

public class ChildActionOutputCacheAttribute : OutputCacheAttribute
{
    public ChildActionOutputCacheAttribute(string cacheProfile)
    {
        var settings = (OutputCacheSettingsSection)WebConfigurationManager.GetSection("system.web/caching/outputCacheSettings");
        var profile = settings.OutputCacheProfiles[cacheProfile];
        Duration = profile.Duration;
        VaryByParam = profile.VaryByParam;
        VaryByCustom = profile.VaryByCustom;
    }
}

The advantage of this approach is that you get to still keep all your profiles in just one place in the web.config.

This is also posted in the related question: https://stackoverflow.com/a/13866280/1373170

Answer 4

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).