cacheing static parts of a ASP.NET page on the client

[urs.eichmann]

Hello,
several parts of the pages of my ASP.NET 2.0 site are mainly static,
such as a treeview with all the product categories, a menu bar, the
company header and so on. But they also have a dynamic part, such as a
product list. If I look at the rendered HTML, the static parts are
roughly 60%-70% of the whole HTML sent to the client. Especially the
treeview will quickly sum up to 30K of nested TABLE, TR, TD tags and
javascript.

Since the static parts rarely change, I am looking for ways to cache
them on the client. When a postback occurs, I want to send only the
changed parts to the client (i.e. the product list). I considered the
following alternatives:

- <FRAME> - ugly, don't want scroll bars, not good on small screens
- Ajax - would be nice, but too late in the product cycle to switch to
this technology.
- embedding static HTML with <OBJECT> - this sounds interesting to me,
but I'm not sure if this is supported on all current browsers (IE>=5.5,
Firefox, Mozilla, Opera>=8). Also I couldn't find an example how to
render e.g. the output of an ASP.NET treeview into a separate HTML file
and referencing the generated HTML in OBJECT tag.

Did I overlook a more obvious solution? Does anyone have a better idea?

Thanks for any help and best regards,
Urs

 

[Guest]

You can use UserControls with "Fragment Caching". Here's the Quickstarts page

http://asp.net/QuickStart/aspnet/doc/caching/default.aspx

QUICKSTARTS!

Peter

 

[urs.eichmann]

Peter, this is not what I'm looking for. Fragment Caching caches the
output on the SERVER, but I want to cache static HTML on the CLIENT
side.
Regards,
Urs

 

[Guest]

I see. Unfortunately, I don't believe browsers are that smart. They see a
"Page" and whatever else (images, etc) is linked in it that has a "src"
attribute, and they obey any caching directives, and they just stick it all
in the cache.

Peter