Hi Chris,

I got this working but not on id. More on controller level.

I will explain our use case so you understand what we were doing. We have DTGE grid block that displays x latest news items. So when a news detail page is updated we wanted to update all these blocks, but leave the rest of the page in cache.

I first created a new abstract controller that inherits from DocTypeGridEditorSurfaceController so we can pass in some extra parameters from the view. You need to inherits your controller from this one.

namespace Website.Controllers
{
    using Our.Umbraco.DocTypeGridEditor.Helpers;

    using Umbraco.Core.Models;

    public abstract class CachedDocTypeGridEditorSurfaceController : DocTypeGridEditorSurfaceController
    {
        public new IPublishedContent Model
        {
            get
            {
                return DocTypeGridEditorHelper.ConvertValueToContent(this.Id, this.ContentTypeAlias, this.Value);
            }
        }

        public string Id
        {
            get { return this.ControllerContext.RouteData.Values["dtgeId"] as string ?? string.Empty; }
        }


        public string ContentTypeAlias
        {
            get { return this.ControllerContext.RouteData.Values["dtgeContentTypeAlias"] as string ?? string.Empty; }
        }

        public string Value
        {
            get { return this.ControllerContext.RouteData.Values["dtgeValue"] as string ?? string.Empty; }
        }
    }
}

Next step is to create a new "renderrer" for your cached grid blocks. I called CachedDoctypeGridEditor.cshtml and placed in the /Views/Grid folder of my website.

This is the contents of the view.

@using Microsoft.CSharp.RuntimeBinder
@using Our.Umbraco.DocTypeGridEditor.Helpers
@inherits Umbraco.Web.Mvc.UmbracoViewPage<dynamic>
@if (Model.value != null)
{
    string id = Model.value.id.ToString();  
    string contentTypeAlias = "";
    string value = Model.value.value.ToString();
    string viewPath = Model.editor.config.viewPath.ToString();

    try
    {
        contentTypeAlias = Model.value.dtgeContentTypeAlias.ToString();
    }
    catch (RuntimeBinderException)
    {
        contentTypeAlias = Model.value.docType.ToString();
    }

    if (contentTypeAlias != "")
    {
        var content = DocTypeGridEditorHelper.ConvertValueToContent(id, contentTypeAlias, value);       

        @Html.Action(content.DocumentTypeAlias, content.DocumentTypeAlias + "Surface", new
                                                              {
                                                                  dtgeValue = value,
                                                                  dtgeId = id,
                                                                  dtgeContentTypeAlias = contentTypeAlias,
                                                                  dtgeViewPath = viewPath,
                                                                  dtgePreviewViewPath = ""
                                                              }, true);
    }
}

It calls your controller action and excludes it from the parent cache. You can ofcourse annotate your controller action with the DonutOutputCache attribute.

Next step is tell your grid editor config to use the new renderrer.

{
        "name": "News list",
        "alias": "newslist",
        "view": "/App_Plugins/DocTypeGridEditor/Views/doctypegrideditor.html",
        "render": "/Views/Grid/CachedDoctypeGridEditor.cshtml",
        "icon": "icon-grid",
        "config": {
            "allowedDocTypes": ['gridNews'],
            "nameTemplate": "",
            "enablePreview": true,
            "viewPath": "/Views/Partials/Grid/Editors/DocTypeGridEditor/",
            "previewViewPath": "/Views/Partials/Grid/Editors/DocTypeGridEditor/Previews/",
            "previewCssFilePath": "",
            "previewJsFilePath": ""
        }
    }

Last thing what you need to do is build some logic that decides if the grid block cache should be emptied.

You can empty the cache for all the grid blocks using a specific controller like this :

var cachemanager = new OutputCacheManager();
cachemanager.RemoveItems("ControllerNameSurface");

If you have anymore questions. Just shoot.

Dave