ASP.NET OutPutCache VaryByParam and VaryByHeader with AJAX

Question

I'm trying to do some caching using VaryByParam AND VaryByHeader. When an AJAX request comes in I return a partial XHTML. When a regular request comes in I send the partial XHTML page with header / footer.

I tried to cache the page by doing:

[OutputCache( Duration = 5, VaryByParam = "nickname,page", VaryByHeader = "X-Requested-With" )]

However this doesn't work... if I do a regular request first then run the AJAX call I get the full cached page instead of the partial and vice-versa. Seems like VaryByHeader is being ignored. Is it because X-Requested-With is omitted on normal requests? Or perhaps it's doing VaryByParam OR VaryByHeader?

My obvious way around this is for AJAX requests to call a different method which only returns partial pages, however I'd like to avoid that if possible.

I'm using ASP.NET MVC 1.0 with the OutputCacheAttribute.

Herold

Turns out it may have just been an issue on my home machine. Testing it on another machine and it seems to work fine. – Herold

Answer 1

According to this MSDN reference, multiple values in VaryByParam should be semicolon separated, not comma separated.

Trainer

Answer 2

Try using www.fiddlertool.com to check the headers and see if they are being passed in the first place.

Douche

Answer 3

Your Duration is set to 5 seconds. Is this intentional? I suspect might have something to do with your cache timing out after this period.

Needs

Apologies, I was playing with my settings before I copied and pasted that code. It is actually set to 120. – Herold