Question

I have the following situation… In a certain View, the user must select the initial hour, the final hour and the weekday. But, I can’t save this informations to DB ’cause I need to save my whole page and I need the primary key of the primary table, but that’s not the point.

So, while I don’t save these data to DB, I’m saving to a Session. I was told to save to a cookie, but it appears that cookies have a size limit. So, I’m saving to a Session.

Buuuut, I was also told that I could save these informations (hours and weekday) to the user page, simulating a ASP.NET ViewState…

Does anyone know how to do this?? Does anyone know how to save temporarily these data withou using cookie or Session??

Thanks!!

Answer 1

Hidden input fields won’t help?

<%= Html.Hidden(...) %> 

Update (serializing an object to base64):

var formatter = new BinaryFormatter(); var stream = new MemoryStream(); formatter.Serialize(stream, myObject); // myObject should be serializable. string result = Convert.ToBase64String(stream.ToArray()); 

When you want to fetch it back:

var formatter = new BinaryFormatter(); var stream = new MemoryStream(Convert.FromBase64String(hiddenFieldValue)); var myObject = (MyObjectType)formatter.Deserialize(stream); 

Make sure you validate the data stored in the field when you use it as the client might change it. ViewState takes care of this automatically.

Side note: ASP.NET uses LosFormatter instead of BinaryFormatter to serialize ViewState as it’s more efficient or ASCII based serialization. You might want to consider that too.