Output caching for an ApiController (MVC4 Web API)

I'm trying to cache the output of an ApiController method in Web API.

Here's the controller code:

public class TestController : ApiController
{
    [OutputCache(Duration = 10, VaryByParam = "none", Location = OutputCacheLocation.Any)]
    public string Get()
    {
        return System.DateTime.Now.ToString();
    }
}

N.B. I'd also tried the OutputCache attribute on the controller itself, as well as several combinations of its parameters.

The route is registered in Global.asax:

namespace WebApiTest
{
    public class Global : HttpApplication
    {
        protected void Application_Start(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
            RouteTable.Routes.MapHttpRoute("default", routeTemplate: "{controller}");
        }
    }
}

I get a successful response, but it's not cached anywhere:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Cache-Control: no-cache
Pragma: no-cache
Content-Type: application/xml; charset=utf-8
Expires: -1
Server: Microsoft-IIS/7.5
X-AspNet-Version: 4.0.30319
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
Date: Wed, 18 Jul 2012 17:56:17 GMT
Content-Length: 96

<string xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/2003/10/Serialization/">18/07/2012 18:56:17</string>

I was not able to find documentation for output caching in Web API.

Is this a limitation of the Web API in MVC4 or am I doing something wrong?

Solution 1:

WebAPI does not have any built in support for the [OutputCache] attribute. Take a look at this article to see how you could implement this feature yourself.

Solution 2:

The answer of Aliostad states that Web API turns off caching, and the code of HttpControllerHandler shows that it does WHEN response.Headers.CacheControl is null.

To make your example ApiController Action return a cacheable result, you can:

using System.Net.Http;

public class TestController : ApiController
{
    public HttpResponseMessage Get()
    {
        var response = Request.CreateResponse(HttpStatusCode.OK);
        response.Content = new StringContent(System.DateTime.Now.ToString());
        response.Headers.CacheControl = new CacheControlHeaderValue();
        response.Headers.CacheControl.MaxAge = new TimeSpan(0, 10, 0);  // 10 min. or 600 sec.
        response.Headers.CacheControl.Public = true;
        return response;
    }
}

and you will get a HTTP response header like this:

Cache-Control: public, max-age=600
Content-Encoding: gzip
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
Date: Wed, 13 Mar 2013 21:06:10 GMT
...