CODEWITHSUNDEEP
asp.net
Jecxz
Jecxz

Reputation: 33

Instantiated Object Lifetime

I'm designing a new ASP.NET website (ASP.NET is somewhat new to me so forgive stupid questions) and I was wondering about the life time of an object that I would instantiate in the Global.asax's Application_Start event (i.e. new myClass()). I would refer to the object through a static pointer somewhere.

The reason why I was thinking of doing this was to create a master object for the running ASP.NET application that would track some pieces of information per user (browser), even though I'm storing much of the info in my database. In other words, I wanted to use an array of sessions indexed by a user key, and this array would be an element in myClass that, as mentioned above, gets instantiated in the Global.asax's Application_Start event. I'll regularly trim my array to account for users who have gone off or haven't done anything after NN minutes.

Or, is this just nuts because objects instantiated during the application's life are not reliable in terms of lifetime.

Thanks in advance!

Kind regards, Derek

Upvotes: 1

Views: 391

Answers (2)

Seth Flowers
Seth Flowers

Reputation: 9190

Why not use the application cache?

Unfortunately, msdn appears to be down right now, but the link is http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.web.httpcontext.cache.aspx

It is accessible in your asp.net site through the Context property of the current HttpApplication.

Upvotes: 1

Guffa
Guffa

Reputation: 700362

Where you create the object doesn't matter, what matters is where you store the reference to the object.

If you put the reference in a static variable, the object will survive as long as the application is running.

Using static variables in a web application can have its uses, but you have to be careful as a web application is multi threaded. If you change any data in the object, you have to synchronise the access to the data, so that only one thread at a time can access it.

Upvotes: 0

Related Questions