ASP in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition

Chapter 18. Counters Component

Chapter 4, demonstrated how to instantiate an application-scoped variable and use it throughout your application. Such a variable maintains the same value for every user of your application and lasts until the last user session ends or until the web server is restarted. Such application-level variables can be very useful, but what happens when the application ends and restarts? The value of these application variables must be reinitialized. In that chapter, I suggested that you could save the application variables to a text file at the end of the application and reinitialize the variable using the saved value each time the application is restarted. If you have several application-level variables, this process can be problematic. Luckily, for numeric variables anyway, there is a better way. You can use a Counters component.

The Microsoft Counters component allows you to create, increment, decrement, store, and remove any number of unique counters. You declare one Counters component for your entire site in GLOBAL.ASA . A Counters object is instantiated once for your site (not once per application) and, from that time, is limitless in scope. No matter what session or application is available, the Counters component is always accessible from anywhere. You need only one Counters object for your entire site.

As you might guess, a Counters object allows you to create web-site-scoped counter variables that hold the same value for every user of every application ...