Question

I just got a project that have some core classes that uses static methods.

It is a C# project, with an interface that reflects some methods to javascript.
In this interface, there are a lot of calls to static methods that uses HttpContext and get data from database (actually just one access database), such as this (some methods have some logic inside):

public static string UsrId {
    get{
        try {
            return HttpContext.Current.Session["usrid"].ToString();
        } catch(NullReferenceException) {
            return ServiceVars.GuestId;
        }
    }
}

So my question is:

Is this a bad pratice? What are the cons (and pros?) of doing this?

I read somewhere that static methods that uses database connections are bad for high traffic sites, because it would queue up the requests. Is this true? Or should I not worry about database connection in static methods?

And what about the HttpContext inside static methods, is it bad and why?

Answer 1

What’s bad here is the catch of NullReferenceException. Don’t ever do that.

Instead, check for null first:

public static string UsrId {
    get{
        var userId = HttpContext.Current.Session["usrid"];
        if (userId == null) { return ServiceVars.GuestId;}
        return userId .ToString();
    }
}

Also, the problem you may be referring to isn’t a problem with static methods, or with HttpContext. It’s a problem with using Session state.