asp.netsessionsession-stateweb-farmstateserver

Using Stateserver Session in ASP.NET web farm

I have created an online shopping website which will be deployed on a web farm. As a result of this, I've decided to use the Stateserver Session Management provided by ASP.NET. Now, I have a login page. After the user logs in successfully I redirect him to the Catalogue page where he can subsequently add books to his shopping cart.

From what I have come to understand, the Session is stored in the form of a key-value pair. So, if I create a Session for a particular user(say his name is "abc") then I would do something like this:

Session["abc"]=tmp; //where tmp is a "List" of items that "abc" has added to the cart

Now after he is redirected to another page, how do I retrieve this session? From what I have read I would have to write:

temp=Session["abc"]

How do I send this username to another page as a parameter. Since, this is on a web farm the client could be connected to different servers for each request and there could be multiple clients logging in at the same time. So if I create a Session for all of them with their respective usernames as the keys, how can I retrieve their sessions when they are browsing different pages?

I don't think I have understood the exact working of the Session ID, so if someone could help me with that it would be great.

Solution

  • How do I send this username to another page as a parameter.

    You don't need to send it. The Session object is not part of the page response, it lives on the server side. Therefore, you may set it on page A and be able to retrieve it on page B using the same code you provided:

    Session["abc"]=tmp;

    And

    temp=Session["abc"]

    So if I create a Session for all of them with their respective usernames as the keys, how can I retrieve their sessions when they are browsing different pages?

    You may retrieve it with the same key you used to store the object in the session. As a matter of fact you may use the same key for all users. For example:

    username=Session["username"]

    Note: .Net will retrieve the right instance for each object by using a unique identifier that is assigned to each user (the user's SessionId). This however, is transparent to your code.

    This question lists a few gotchas when using StateServer Session