how to cache user details in a partial in mvc

Question

In the header of every page I am showing Username and User points. This is being pulled in from a partial (which gets the points from the database).

How can I cache this partial so that across each page I avoid having to check the database for the users points, and after 24hrs it can look again (cache expires). Also if the user logs off and someone else logs in it will show the new username and points (not the previously cached one).

Answer 1

This is user specific so I would store it in a persistent cookie. So when a user authenticates you could query the database to fetch the required information and issue a persistent cookie which will expire in 24h. Then in the partial you would check whether the cookie exists and fetch the necessary data from this cookie and if the cookie doesn't exist query the database and reemit the cookie. When the user logs out you could remove the cookie although that's not strictly necessary because when he logs back in (with the same or other username) you would query the database once again and reemit the cookie.

And because we live in 2011 and HTML5 is knocking on our doors instead of cookies I would probably use the HTML5 Local Storage and if the browser doesn't support it fallback to cookies.