Hi All,
I'd like to have an action that on the first request will save the view result to a HTML file and then return the view, and in the next request the MvcHandler will just point to this generated HTML file without referring to the controller, this way I can avoid some heavy DB work in pages that usually stay static.
How can this be done?
While what you've described is indeed a possible strategy to speed up things, OutputCache is a viable alternative.
The outputcache lives in the memory for a finite time. Also note that if you write a HTML file there will be a write operation involved. You may also need a mechanism to refresh the HTML file you've written.
If you want to stick with your own strategy (read a file from the server) you could do that easily.
In the Controller you could check if your file exists like this.
public ContentResult MyPage()
{
if(System.IO.File.Exists(Server.MapPath("myFile.html"))
{
return Content(System.File.ReadAllText("myFile.html");
}
else
{
GenerateMyFile(); //This function generates the file
return Content(System.File.ReadAllText("myFile.html");
}
}
I found what I was looking for in the answer Dan Atkinson gave for this question:
Rendering a view to a string in MVC, then redirecting — workarounds?