My current project is a large multi-lingual eCommerce engagement. Due to business requirements (on-the-fly updates), we externalized resources into a database
(following this
MSDN article). Furthermore due to business requirements (uptime for a very
high revenue site with regular mid-day content updates), they need to be able to publish markup (aspx & ascx) on the fly without restarting IIS.
We were seeing a sporadic issue where resources would disappear on the page. For example, there was custom control that looked like so:
<custom:CustomHyperLink ID="TL" runat="server" ImageUrl="[Header
Image]" SiteMapNodeId="Basket" ToolTip="[Header]" meta:resourcekey="HeaderImage" />
When everything was working (which was 99% of the time), the ImageUrl would be
looked up at runtime (via the control's HeaderImage.ImageUrl resource) and
substituted in as ~/images/en/header_en.gif. But when it didn't work, we
would see an <img src="[Header Image]" />, which obviously is a problem.
Adding to the confusion was that only some of the resources showed this
problem. Also, it was seemingly random. Everything would be working one minute,
broken the next, in the middle of the day. Putting together steps to reproduce
was nearly impossible. It had something to do with loading resources and/or
compiling the site and/or restarting iis and/or the planets aligning.
Here's what we didn't understand: Resources in ASP.NET can be declared either explicitly
or implicitly. Explicit means code, GetGlobalResourceObject("keyName") or
GetLocalResourceObject("keyName"). Implicit means markup, meta:resourcekey="keyName".
Explicit calls are evaluated at runtime, every time, because it is regular code that gets executed in the regular way.
Implicit calls are evaluated once at compile time, and the compiler (essentially) hooks up a binding to between the
appropriate property and the explicit / GetLocalResourceObject()* call. To walk
through the above control sample:
- At ASP.NET compile time, that line is parsed. The compiler looks at what’s specified in meta:resourcekey.
- That key is passed into IImplicitResourceProvider.GetImplicitResourceKeys.
This method queries the resource provider for all valid keys starting with HeaderImage, and returns all of those keys in an ICollection.
Our example thus returns {"HeaderImage.ImageUrl", "HeaderImage.ToolTip"}.
- The compiler inspects all of the keys, parses them, and performs databinding.
Our example matches HeaderImage.ImageUrl from our resource provider and hooks up
a binding between the property and IImplicitResourceProvider.GetObject("HeaderImage.ImageUrl") ... *which I believe calls GetLocalResourceObject() to complete the circle.
If the resource datastore, whatever it may be, is unavailable (or empty!) at
ASP.NET compile time, the call to GetImplicitResourceKeys will return nothing and no
databinding will occur.
That's what was happening to our resources. We would push new markup and
immediately afterwards import new resources. But our import process was naïve;
it deleted all of the resources from the database, scanned the filesystem for
.resx files, loaded them into memory, and then inserted them into the database.
And because it was a live site, many of these controls would be hit by the
ASP.NET compiler while the database was empty. This meant the compiler
thought it had nothing to do because GetImplicitResourceKeys returned nothing
and so would let the resources fall back to their default text, in our case,
[Header Image].
The resources that never exhibited a problem were of course retrieved
explicitly.
I want to give credit to
Rick Strahl,
whose
blogged
frustrations about this topic helped point me in the right
direction.
Unlike him, I did not have to implement IImplicitResourceProvider (which
agrees with MSDN), I just had to
trace down a race condition where it was being called at an inopportune time.
In summary, pushing new markup and then immediately emptying the resource
datastore on a live site will break implicit (meta:resourcekey) resources due to
how the ASP.NET compiler resolves implicit bindings.
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