Question

So, I am working on a demo web dashboard. Previously, I had been using Session to store settings about the dashboard, but I would like to move it to a more persistent means of saving settings.

It seems to me that using cookies would be my best bet. I’m not entirely positive I have the time to work everything out for writing to/from a database properly.

That being said, I might be in over my head on some assumptions I had made about the similarities between Session and Cookies.

Currently, I have some code like this:

public Dictionary<string, RadPageViewSetting> PageViewStates
    {
        get
        {
            Dictionary<string, RadPageViewSetting> _pageViewStates = (Dictionary<string, RadPageViewSetting>)Session["PageViewStates"];
            if (object.Equals(_pageViewStates, null))
            {
                _pageViewStates = new Dictionary<string, RadPageViewSetting>();
                Session["PageViewStates"] = _pageViewStates;
            }

            return _pageViewStates;
        }
        set
        {
            Session["PageViewStates"] = value;
        }
    }

where RadPageViewSetting is a class with some properties in it which I am recording.

Is this functionality possible with cookies? If not, where should I be looking to persist my data through browser-closes?

EDIT: I am going to use http://weblogs.asp.net/pwelter34/archive/2006/05/03/444961.aspx to help me serialize the dictionary and then go about serializing my own custom data hypers (RadPageViewSetting).

EDIT: Here’s my untested solution. Could someone take a look at this real quick and let me know if it looks incorrect?

        public SerializableDictionary<string, RadPageViewSetting> PageViewStates
    {
        get
        {
            SerializableDictionary<string, RadPageViewSetting> _pageViewStates = new SerializableDictionary<string,RadPageViewSetting>();
            HttpCookie cookie = HttpContext.Current.Response.Cookies["PageViewStates"]; //If the named cookie does not exist, this method creates a new cookie with that name.

            if (object.Equals(cookie, null))
            {
                cookie = new HttpCookie("PageViewStates");
                cookie.Expires = DateTime.Now.AddYears(100);
                cookie.Value = null;
                HttpContext.Current.Response.Cookies.Add(cookie);
            }
            else if( cookie.Value != null )
            {
                MemoryStream stream = new MemoryStream();
                StreamWriter writer = new StreamWriter(stream);
                writer.Write(cookie.Value);
                XmlSerializer serializer = new XmlSerializer(_pageViewStates.GetType());
                _pageViewStates = serializer.Deserialize(stream) as SerializableDictionary<string, RadPageViewSetting>;
                HttpContext.Current.Response.Cookies.Set(cookie);
            }

            return _pageViewStates;
        }
        set
        {
            XmlSerializer serializer = new XmlSerializer(value.GetType());
            MemoryStream stream = new MemoryStream();
            serializer.Serialize(stream, value);
            StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(stream);
            HttpContext.Current.Response.Cookies["PageViewStates"].Value = reader.ReadToEnd();
        }
    }

Answer 1

Simple use Response.Cookies instead of Session.

Basically in a nutshell from MSDN

Response.Cookies["userName"].Value = "patrick";
Response.Cookies["userName"].Expires = DateTime.Now.AddDays(1);

HttpCookie aCookie = new HttpCookie("lastVisit");
aCookie.Value = DateTime.Now.ToString();
aCookie.Expires = DateTime.Now.AddDays(1);
Response.Cookies.Add(aCookie);

You should be able to store what ever you like in the cookie as long as you can serialize it into a string. As cookies are plain text.