Hey package guru’s,
I’m wondering how you would go about the following scenario, and more importantly: why?
Let’s say you have a workspace view (aka Content App) on every content node where you can add some custom data for that specific node. We have multiple packages that do this, but for the example it doesn’t matter what that data is. This data is saved in a custom table in the database, so it’s completely seperate from the Umbraco content.
This also means that it’s complete seperate from any caching that Umbraco might have. So it’s quite possible that there is a custom record for each content node in a custom table.
Because this data also needs to be shown in dashboards, it really needs to be cached, otherwise the performance is going to be horrible. Right now, I usually create an index that indexes the records and gets all required data from both the custom table as well as Umbraco so that the record can be used as-is in a dashboard.
But I’m wondering: is an index the ‘best’ option here? When should I use an index and when should I use caching? Especially because indexes and Umbraco aren’t the most stable thing in the world, if I can do without one, it would be a win I guess…