Question

I have looked at this question first: retain value after page refresh. But it seems like it doesn’t work with collections because the ViewState only store one value. I need to use the collection because I do not know how many instances of object the user will create. Therefore, the ViewState is not an option. I also tried using static variables but it stores the values for longer than I need it (I found the explanation for this here: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en/csharpgeneral/thread/3664cd62-46c7-4098-88a7-c09647673096).

I would massively appreciate your help.

Answer 1

You could store the List<> instance in the client session on the server side. Then on each request you will have access to the list in the session.

However, you should still be able to use viewstate, as long as the items in your List<> are serializable.

You should consider the amount of data being exchanged between the browser and web server when using viewstate. If your items are not unreasonably large and you will not have too many of them in the list then viewstate might not be unreasonable.

The code might look something like this.

private ArrayList GlobalList
{ 
  get 
  { 
     return ViewState["GlobalList"]; 
  } 
  set 
  { 
    ViewState["GlobalList"] = value; 
  } 
}