Chapter 19. The HttpSessionState Class
A significant challenge for any Web-based application is managing user state. Unlike rich client applications, in which user state can be stored in persistent variables local to the client application, web browsers do not have a comparable built-in facility for persistently storing user state locally. This is because HTTP, the basic communication protocol used in web applications, is essentially a connectionless protocol (the HTTP specification allows persistent connections, but problems with persistent HTTP connections prevent this specification from being widely used). Each HTTP request/response is treated as completely separate from every other request/response. As such, any local variable storage cannot be reliably mapped from the request/response in which they were created to any subsequent request/response.
An early solution to this challenge was the creation of cookies, which are bits of text that are stored either in memory (per-session cookies) or on disk (persistent cookies) and are associated with the domain name from which they originated. This solves the problem of being able to associate a bit of data with more than one request/response, but it has limitations that made it less than an ideal solution:
Cookies can only store text (or a textual representation of other data), which means that cookie data cannot be made typesafe.
Cookies are limited in size (the size limit depends on the browser, but is often 4k).
Cookies can be ...
Get ASP.NET in a Nutshell now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.