Home/ Questions/Q 7024827
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-27T23:53:36+00:00

I am designing an online time tracking software to be used internally. I am

  • 0

I am designing an online time tracking software to be used internally. I am fairly new to c# and .NET though I have extensive PHP experience.

I am using Windows Forms Authentication, and once the user logs in using that, I create a Timesheet object (my own custom class).

As part of this class, I have a constructor that checks the SQL DB for information (recent entries by this user, user preferences, etc.)

Should I be storing this information in a session? And then checking the session object in the constructor first? That seems the obvious approach, but most examples I’ve looked at don’t make much use of sessions. Is there something I don’t know that others do (specifically related to .NET sessions of course)?

EDIT:
I forgot to mention two things.
1. My SQL DB is on another server (though I believe they are both on the same network, so not much of an issue)
2. There are certain constants that the user will not be able to change (only the admin can modify them) such as project tasks. These are used on every page, but loaded the first time from the DB. Should I be storing these in a session? If not, where else?
The only other way I can think of is a local flat file that updates each time the table of projects is updated, but that seems like a hack solution. Am I trying too hard to minimize calls to the DB?

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    There is a good overview on ASP.NET Session here: ASP.NET Session State.

    If you don’t have thousands of clients, but need “some state” stored server-side, this is very easy to use and works well. It can also be stored in the database in multi server scenarios, without changing a line in your code, just by configuration.

    My advise would be not to store “big”, or full object hierarchies in there, as storing in a session (if the session is shared among servers in a web farm in a database for example) can be somewhat costy. If you plan to have only one server, this is not really a problem, but you have to know that you won’t be able to easily move to a multiple server mode easily.

    The worst thing to do is follow the guys who just say “session is bad, whooooo!”, don’t use it, and eventually rewrite your own system. If you need it, use it 🙂

    • 0