Prevent Caching in ASP.NET MVC for specific actions using an attribute

.net, asp.net-mvc, asp.net-mvc-3, c#, jquery

Solution

To ensure that JQuery isn't caching the results, on your ajax methods, put the following:

$.ajax({
    cache: false
    //rest of your ajax setup
});

Or to prevent caching in MVC, we created our own attribute, you could do the same. Here's our code:

[AttributeUsage(AttributeTargets.Class | AttributeTargets.Method)]
public sealed class NoCacheAttribute : ActionFilterAttribute
{
    public override void OnResultExecuting(ResultExecutingContext filterContext)
    {
        filterContext.HttpContext.Response.Cache.SetExpires(DateTime.UtcNow.AddDays(-1));
        filterContext.HttpContext.Response.Cache.SetValidUntilExpires(false);
        filterContext.HttpContext.Response.Cache.SetRevalidation(HttpCacheRevalidation.AllCaches);
        filterContext.HttpContext.Response.Cache.SetCacheability(HttpCacheability.NoCache);
        filterContext.HttpContext.Response.Cache.SetNoStore();

        base.OnResultExecuting(filterContext);
    }
}

Then just decorate your controller with `[NoCache]`. OR to do it for all you could just put the attribute on the class of the base class that you inherit your controllers from (if you have one) like we have here:

[NoCache]
public class ControllerBase : Controller, IControllerBase

You can also decorate some of the actions with this attribute if you need them to be non-cacheable, instead of decorating the whole controller.

If your class or action didn't have `NoCache` when it was rendered in your browser and you want to check it's working, remember that after compiling the changes you need to do a "hard refresh" (Ctrl+F5) in your browser. Until you do so, your browser will keep the old cached version, and won't refresh it with a "normal refresh" (F5).

Problem

I have an ASP.NET MVC 3 application. This application requests records through jQuery. jQuery calls back to a controller action that returns results in JSON format. I have not been able to prove this, but I'm concerned that my data may be getting cached. I only want the caching to be applied to specific actions, not for all actions. Is there an attribute that I can put on an action to ensure that the data does not get cached? If not, how do I ensure that the browser gets a new set of records each time, instead of a cached set?

Original source