DD4T Caching causing problem, and changes are reflected even after exiting SiteEdit though the changes were not completed by "Finish Editing"

Question

We are trying to implement SiteEdit on a DD4T enabled website.

If we make changes to content and exit SiteEdit by selecting Cancel Editing the changes that were made are still reflected on the pages even though we did not save the changes by selecting Finish Editing. Only once we close the browser and then reopen the page are these changes gone.

Is there a way to make sure the changes are not reflected on the page after exiting SitEdit if we do Cancel Editing? We have disabled caching and still the problem persists. Is there anything we are missing out?? Any help would be appreciated...thanks in advance..!!

Answer 1

The DD4T object cache by default checks for the last publish date of the underlying Tridion components and pages. The problem with Session Preview in Experience Manager is that it does not change the last publish date. This can cause your web application to cache the temporary content created during an XPM session, and use that even after the XPM session has been closed.

The easiest solution would be to use DD4T's NullCacheAgent instead of the DefaultCacheAgent. This can be done by setting the CacheAgent property on the PageFactory and ComponentFactory in your controller. You could for example put the following code in your page controller:

 private IPageFactory _pageFactory = null;
    public override ContentModel.Factories.IPageFactory PageFactory
    {
        get
        {
            if (_pageFactory == null)
            {
                _pageFactory = base.PageFactory;
                _pageFactory.CacheAgent = new DD4T.Factories.Caching.NullCacheAgent();
            }
            return _pageFactory;
        }
    }

Alternative solution You could also disable caching per item type, for example for components only. This can be done by putting the following line in the appSettings section of the web.config:

<add key="DD4T.CacheSettings.Component" value="0" />

This way, pages and things like sitemaps are still cached, improving the performance of your staging environment. In the live production environment you should turn on caching.