Question

Basically I’m trying to create a SessionManager class which I can use to manage sessions in my MVC applications. For that I’m thinking the best way of doing so is by creating a wrapper class for HttpContext which would then allow me to access HttpContext.Current.Session.

To be honest, I’m not really sure about the whole thing, I just feel it’s the logical way of doing so. I also want to create an ISessionManager and ISession interfaces, and then implement them according to my application’s needs. For my current project, and for now, I need a InProc session management, but I might need to store session data in MSSQL Server when we decide to expand and use a web farm or a garden. That’s why I’m trying to build a sort of an extensible framework right from the start.

Final note, I will be using Microsoft Unity to inject the concrete SessionManager of choice. I believe that’s a good way to maintain a certain level of abstraction.

Any suggestions for achieving all that?

Thanks in advance! 🙂

Answer 1

Ok here’s what I came up with, but I’m not sure that’s the right way of doing this so your opinions are most welcome!

ISessionManager:

public interface ISessionManager  
{      
    void RegisterSession(string key, object obj);       
    void FreeSession(string key);   
}

SessionManager:

public class SessionManager : ISessionManager
{
    private IDictionary<string, object> sessionDictionary;

    public SessionManager(IDictionary<string, object> _sessionDictionary)
    {
        sessionDictionary = _sessionDictionary;
    }

    public IDictionary<string, object> Session
    {
        get
        {
            return sessionDictionary;
        }
    }

    public void RegisterSession(string key, object obj)
    {
        sessionDictionary[key] = obj;
    }

    public void FreeSession(string key)
    {
        sessionDictionary[key] = null;
    }
}

Then when I want to instantiate the class (inside my web app), I would do something like that:

var sessionManager = new SessionManager(HttpContext.Current.Session);
sessionManager.RegisterSession["myKey"] = someObject;

But I would prefer to avoid using magic strings as the key. I could include a constant string property like sessionKey = “myKey” in the class, but that would mean I could only store one object in the session manager, right?

Feedback please. 🙂