Question

Is it a good idea to avoid state management techniques(session, cookies etc) in ASP.Net MVC 3.0?

If yes then is there any other alternatives available except TempData?

Answer 1

I find that state is nicely maintained in a cache when implementing the repository pattern. In the MVC Futures project, there is also the Html.Serialize method which gives ‘view state like’ state storage.
http://mvccontrib.codeplex.com/

For information like items bound to a combobox that we were used to having maintained automatically for us in web forms, a good alternative here is to call off to a repository for the data. The repository maintains a reference to a cache (ideally through an interface you create like – ICache). The repository then caches this data based on for ex. the current users name, key whatever. Some prefer to have a service layer cache, but I feel by design a repository layer was meant for this.

Session is still used – if you must – it has its place. A lot of ‘bad’ surrounds the session, but if you need to store session specific information and your site isn’t concerned with a large number of hits a day, then you can likely take the hit just fine.

TempData is great for storing status messages to show on the next request such as ‘record saved successfully’ so you don’t lose it across the redirect and don’t have to pass it on the querystring. Thats about the only thing I use it for although some use it to store data for rebinding on the next request.