title: MVC Web Application Database Driven Menu by User Permissions
body: <p>We are going to port a legacy windows app to a large web application for a vertical market. Looking at MVC. Each implementation may have 50 to 5000 users. Looking at putting navigation in Master Page. The application will contain 200 to 300 menu items, resulting in over 500 views. We want to display a trimmed navigation menu for each user based on their application permissions. A user may see only 20 items, or all available.</p>
  
  <p>Most posts I have seen suggest passing navigation items to Master Page through viewdata, established in a base controller class. I understand this.</p>
  
  <p>Each of the potentially 10's to 1000's of users will have a different set of permissions. </p>
  
  <p>Does anyone have any solutions that will avoid hitting the database to get the users menu items on every controller request that inherits from the base controller?</p>
  
  <p>Is there a caching scheme that will work for each user?</p>
  
  <p>Should the navigation be handled in a frame (not my choice)?</p>
  
  <p>Is this just a price we will pay for this approach to navigation?</p>
  
  <p>Thanks for any input!</p>