Question

The users of my web application may have more than one browser window (or tab) open and pointed to the same page. We’re using cookie based session id’s, and the user will usually work within the same session id in both browsers/tabs. I would like to be able to uniquely identify which browser window (and tab) that requested an ASP.NET page (in order to make sure, that data stored in the session does not get mixed up).

(e.g. I would be happy if the browser would generate and send a window/tab-id with the http request, as it publishes HTTP_USER_AGENT)

Any ideas?

–thomas

Answer 1

If I was going to implement something like this I would probably start with a Dictionary<Type, List<Guid>> and store this in the users session. I would also probably make this be a custom type that delegates the dictionary and have a factory method that works similar to

public Guid GeneratePageIdentifier(Page thepage)
{
    var guid = Guid.New();

    if(_dictionary[thepage.GetType()] == null)
        _dictionary[thepage.GetType()] = new List<Guid> { guid };
    else
        ((List<Guid>)_dictionary[thepage.GetType()]).Add(guid);

    return guid;

}

Then embed the guid that’s returned from that method on the VIewState of the page. On your page methods that execute actions that you need to validate which page it is you would be able to validate that guid is inside the collection do something. You might also want to implement a custom a type with a guid property to enscapulate more information about why you’re doing this or what you need for it to be meaningful.