Phil’s Diary - [Blog @ http://www.philsdiary.net/]
First an apology for posts which sometimes seem, perhaps, a little irrelevant. The main reason is that they may be of interest to some of you (otherwise I’d not even consider posting), and secondly that they’re of interest to me, and it’s a nice way to bookmark something that I can search for later. So while most of you will probably yawn, please don’t think I’m just posting for postings sake.
Ok, sorry to be so techy all day long, but it’s just been one of those days (and I do happen to work in IT).
Busy old day at work, though a small breakthrough (well I thought so).
ASP has an inbuilt session object. Session objects store data about a user while the browse a website, such as a “shopping basket”, logon, identity or whatever. They only stick around while you’re browsing the site (unlike cookies).
They work by storing the information on the webserver. Each user then gets a unique identifier. The identifier is stored alongside the information on the server, but is also sent as a cookie to the user.
When the user asks for a page, the webserver takes the cookie’s value and looks it up in it’s internal database. If the information is there it retrieves it.
The problem is that when the webserver crashes (or you perform an “Unload”) that data is lost, and so the user is forced to start again from the login page of the site.
I had a sudden lightbulb moment today, when I figured a way around this problem. Sure enough with very little work it works very nicely. It’s not totally transparent to the user, but allows them to continue, with not lost data, and still maintains the security of sessions.
I was happy anyway.
Another lovely weather day today, and it’s set to stay like that through the weekend.
Anyhow, that’s enough technology for today. Lets hope I can find something none techy to say over the weekend.
Posted by Phil on September 13, 2002 07:25 PM | Categories: IT