.NET Distributed Caching for MVC and WebAPI.

-Auto-purge of SQL based cache

-In-memory Table Support

At its heart there are 2 components to use:

1. The Attribute jcCACHE
2. The Return function inside the jcCACHEController

For implementation purposes, I'm assuming you have your own ApiController extension, so simply have your base classs extend the jcCACHEController.

Once implemented you can then begin to decorate Actions in your MVC and WebAPI controllers with ease.

I prefer to utilize Enumerations whereever possible, however the library was designed to allow strings or enums. For the sake of the example below I will assume you are using an enum defined as:

public enum REQUESTS {
    NO_CACHE,
    VALUES_GET,
    VALUES_ADD,
    VALUES_DELETE
}

To get started, let me assume you have a GET method that returns a collection of ints like so

[jcCACHE(REQUESTS.VALUES_GET)]
public IEnumerable<int> Get() {
    return Return(val, REQUESTS.VALUES_GET, cacheObject: true);
}

What the attribute is doing in the background is caching that specific request and then checking to see if that request is in the cache and if so simply return the cache. Using the Return wrapper it is saying to cache the result for future requests.

You might be thinking now about well, what if the collection gets modified? I added in a lightweight dependency model in which in the attribute you can define which requests will be invalidated.

For instance, the example below says that upon execution, remove the VALUES_GET cache item:

[HttpGet]
[jcCACHE(REQUESTS.NO_CACHE, new string[] { "VALUES_GET" })]
public bool Add(int a) {
    val.Add(a);

    return Return(true, REQUESTS.VALUES_ADD);
}

By default, the cache is set to nearly infinite (Int.MaxValue minutes in the future), you can however set this as you see fit like so:

[jcCACHE(REQUESTS.VALUES_GET, expirationInMinutes: 60)]
public IEnumerable<int> Get() {
    return Return(val, REQUESTS.VALUES_GET, cacheObject: true);
}

In this example, the cache will be valid for 60 minutes.

That's all there is to using the library.

<add key="jcDC_CachePlatform" value="SQL"/>

Be sure to add Entity Framework via NuGet and that you have a connection string defined in your web.config. For example for my local testing:

  <connectionStrings>
    <add name="jcDCEFModel" connectionString="data source=localhost;initial catalog=jcDC;persist security info=True;user id=jcdcsa;password=jcdcsa;MultipleActiveResultSets=True;App=EntityFramework" providerName="System.Data.SqlClient" />
  </connectionStrings>

Be sure to run the SQL/DBCreate.sql script on your database server (SQL Server 2016 CTP in my case).