Question

My application is simple, I have 2 pages:

1. RSSProducer.aspx: A page that generates RSS (XML) feeds
2. RssConsumer.aspx: A page that retrieves the RSS feeds and displays it to the user in a repeater control. To do this I am using the System.Xml.XmlTextReader to fill a DataSet with tables based on the RSS-XML retrieved from the RSSProducePage. A table within the DataSet is bound to the repeater control.

For example, this is what I have in my RssConsumer.aspx page:

 Protected Sub Page_Load(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles Me.Load
    Session("permittedToViewSomeDetail") = True
    Dim url = "http://localhost/DevSite/RSSProducer.aspx"
    Dim reader As New System.Xml.XmlTextReader(url)
    Dim ds As New DataSet()
    ds.ReadXml(reader)
    myRssRepeater.DataSource = ds.Tables(2)
    myRssRepeater.DataBind()
  End Sub

My problem is that user-authorization details are stored in Session in the RssConsumer page that need to be accessed in the RSSProducer page (in this example it would be Session(“permittedToViewSomeDetail”) that I need to access in the RSSProducer page); however, the Session identifier is not common between the two. This means that I cannot access the authorization details in the RSSProducer page.

The reason for why is fairly clear to me:

1. User’s browser makes a request to
   the RssConsumer page
2. Server generates a Session ID (which is stored in a cookie) if
   there is no existing Session
   Identifer
3. The RSSConsumer requests the RSSProducer page…which generates a
   new Session ID every time because no
   session identifier is ever going to
   be found.

I tried using cookieless session so that I could pass the SessionID via the URL to the RSSProducer page as an experiment but for some reason the XmlTextReader doesn’t work well with this method (but the desired shared session does work).

I’ve hit a brick wall here.
Does anyone know how to share session between pages when one page makes a request to the other?

Thanks,

-Frinny

Answer 1

I ended up taking a different approach to solving this problem. I moved the code out of the RssProducer.aspx page into the RssConsumer.aspx page. I am now able to apply the correct authorization to the feature and it’s actually more efficient this way because I don’t need to produce/consume RSS-XML any more.

Thanks to everyone who took the time to help me with this.

-Frinny