Question

Pardon me if this question has already been asked. HttpContext.Current.Session["key"] returns an object and we would have to cast it to that particular Type before we could use it. I was looking at various implementations of typed sessions

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/aspnet/typedsessionstate.aspx
http://weblogs.asp.net/cstewart/archive/2008/01/09/strongly-typed-session-in-asp-net.aspx
http://geekswithblogs.net/dlussier/archive/2007/12/24/117961.aspx

and I felt that we needed to add some more code (correct me if I was wrong) to the SessionManager if we wanted to add a new Type of object into session, either as a method or as a separate wrapper. I thought we could use generics

public static class SessionManager<T> where T:class
 {
  public void SetSession(string key,object objToStore)
  {
   HttpContext.Current.Session[key] = objToStore;
  }

  public T GetSession(string key)
  {
   return HttpContext.Current.Session[key] as T;
  }
    
 }

• Is there any inherent advantage in
  using

  SessionManager<ClassType>.GetSession("sessionString")

than using

HttpContext.Current.Session["sessionString"] as ClassType

• I was also thinking it would be nice
  to have something like

SessionManager["sessionString"] = objToStoreInSession,
but found that a static class cannot have an indexer. Is there any other way to achieve this ?

• My thought was create a SessionObject which would store the Type and the object, then add this object to Session (using a SessionManager), with the key. When retrieving, cast all objects to SessionObject ,get the type (say t) and the Object (say obj) and cast obj as t and return it.

  public class SessionObject { public Type type {get;set;} public Object obj{get;set;} }

this would not work as well (as the return signature would be the same, but the return types will be different).

Is there any other elegant way of saving/retrieving objects in session in a more type safe way

Answer 1

For a very clean, maintainable, and slick way of dealing with Session, look at this post. You’ll be surprised how simple it can be.