I’ve been working lately with some ASP.NET performance optimization automation HTTP modules. In one of them I needed to know if the last-modified header had been set through the Response.Cache.SetLastModified(DateTime) method.
For some reason, there is no API available anywhere within the BCL to retrieve the last modified date of a response - you can only set it.
Since the module wouldn’t work without a way to read the last modified date of the response, I had to use Reflector to figure out how to pull the information out using reflection. The result became a simple little method to retrieve the date. It looks like this:
privatestaticDateTime ReadLastModifiedFromResponse(HttpCachePolicy cache)
{
BindingFlags flags = BindingFlags.NonPublic | BindingFlags.GetField | BindingFlags.Instance;
return (DateTime)cache.GetType().GetField(“_utcLastModified”, flags).GetValue(cache);
}
And you can use it like this:
DateTime responseModified = ReadLastModifiedFromResponse(Response.Cache);
if (responseModified > DateTime.MinValue)
{
// Last-modified is set. Do something…
}
If you know of another way to retrieving the last-modified date, please let me know.