Question

I am working with ASP.NET MVC 3.0. I have a page with an action link that makes appear a window in which you can adjust a certain value. Once the new value is sent to the database, an extern application deals with the value and send the result back to that database. I want the action link to be disabled while the extern application is doing her job. The page I am working on is refreshing automatically with some AJAX calls. The date when the extern application finished her last adjustment on a value is kept in the database. I first thought I could use session variables to store the date time of when the action link was pressed (because I need it through all the application) and then enable the action link when the adjust time is greater than the time when the action link was pressed, but I heard it was bad practices. Does someone have another solution?

Answer 1

Since you are already using the database – query the database to check the current status. If your application is restarted – a session value would be lost unless you are using a state server (ie sql server) to manage state- unless you don’t care if its lost upon restart. You can use session and save yourself database calls – but the database is a bit cleaner and doesn’t suffer from the same issue. If you do end up using the session, don’t spread that session value all over your code, simply have a single method that reads or sets it (same with the db solution as well)