CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#asp.netsessionserialization
Kashif Khan
Kashif Khan

Reputation: 695

Is it possible to Serialize/Deserialize Session object in asp.net

I have the following session configuration in web.config

<sessionState mode="InProc" timeout="1440" cookieless="false">

However for some reason session is timing out. So all I want to do is if the session is expired then reload the saved session, if session serialization is possbile. Is it possible to save a Session object then reload it?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 2532

Answers (2)

Mark Waterman
Mark Waterman

Reputation: 961

Johnny5's comment probably hit the nail on the head--your process will shut down after a period of inactivity and all InProc sessions will be lost. I don't think IISExpress under Visual Studio gives you a way to control this, so consider running under full-blown IIS during development and increase your app pool's "idle timeout" property to 1440.

But if you really are looking for a way to save a session, the Session_Start and Session_End events in Global.asax are one place to do this. HttpSessionState isn't serializable, so you'd need to either use a different serializer (as Ernesto suggested) or extract all of the session entries and put them into a different type of serializable collection. (The HttpApplication.Session property is read-only, so it'll probably be easiest to take the latter approach in any case since you can't just swap out full session instances..)

But be warned: you'll have problems with Session_End if you're using InProc--it's much too flaky for all but the most trivial uses. App pools regularly recycle themselves for any number of reasons (predefined intervals, high memory usage, inactivity, etc...) and you won't get the nice Session_End event prior to restart, so you'll lose your sessions without them being persisted.

That's why everyone tells you to use an out-of-process provider if you care the least bit about your sessions. The SQL Server and StateServer modes that ship with ASP.NET are the obvious choices, but if you're looking to do long term storage then you may run into a problem because they don't fire the Session_End event.

My employer (ScaleOut Software) has one of the rare out-of-process session providers that can fire Session_End. It's a commercial product, but it can be run for free on a single server if you only have basic needs and don't require all the scalability and fault tolerance that ScaleOut SessionServer can provide.

Upvotes: 1

Jeff
Jeff

Reputation: 36573

Just increase the session timeout property. If you want more fine grained control of the Session itself, you can change the sessionState mode to use a state server or SQL server (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms178586.aspx)

Upvotes: 1

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