Question

How do you declare a dictionary called MyDic in the master page?

I want MyDic to hold lists of objects MyObj with a date as the key so that I can write something like this: “get the list for date 1/28/2011 from MyDic” or “put this list of MyObj from 1/28/2011 in MyDic”.

I’d like to declare the dictionary in the master page so that I can access it in every page.

Thanks.

Answer 1

How were you planning on persisting the list?
Instead of creating it in the master page, you could create it as an application variable, or if it is user-specific as a session variable. In either case you would do something like:

Dictionary<DateTime, myObj> myList = new Dictionary<DateTime, myObj>();

Then you would store it somewhere:

Session["MyList"] = myList;

and when you need to access it again:

Dictionary<DateTime, myObj> myList = (Dictionary<DateTime, myObj>)Session["MyList"];

You could do the declaration in the Master Page on init or on load, or even better i would suggest doing it in the global.asax file for either session or application