Brownfield development on a tight deadline is never fun, it’s never elegant and it’s certainly not satisfying.

One problem I keep finding is code that repeatedly calls the backing stores with the same query. If I don’t have the time to refactor the code to work properly I sometimes cheat and use a cache that’s specific to the HttpContext. It’s not nice, but it does get me out of a hole every once in a while.

public static class ContextCache
{
	public static T Get(string key)
	{
		var value = HttpContext.Current.Items[key];
		return value is T ? (T)value : default(T);
	}

	public static void Put(string key, object value)
	{
		HttpContext.Current.Items[key] = value;
	}
}

It’s pretty simple to use:

var entity = ContextCache.Get("Entity_123");
if (entity == null)
{
    entity = GetFromBackingStore(123);
    ContextCache.Put("Entity_123", entity);
}

return entity;

This is definitely one of those bits of ugly code that can get you out of a hole in a rush. It aint pretty, but it works.