Managing Session Timeouts in ASP.NET when using ASP.NET GenericHandlers

Question

For example I have a web application using jQuery as a framework on the client side. Now most of the pages are functional by means of using AJAX and communicate to the server by means of using Generic Handlers (.ashx).

Now I have a problem that I am asking this to see what is the best solution for handling these request when my user session expires.

For example, a user logged in, left his browser for 15 minutes and then he pressed a button that this will create a request to the handler, now from the server side when I try to read a session variable obviously it will be empty (session expired). What is the best way to redirect the user back to the login page.

Answer 1

We address this situation by a slightly different approach. Instead of trying to make all the jQuery calls deal with this kind of error condition, we have implemented a parallel timeout system on the client using javascript. A minute before the ASP.NET Session would time out, we pop up a dialog on the browser to warn the user "You have been inactive and are about to be logged out. Click here to remain logged in." We included a little countdown in the dialog also. If they click to stay logged in, we send another jQuery call to the server to reset the session timeout.

So, unless the user has javascript disabled (in which case, the app doesn't work anyway), there is not a possibility that we make a jQuery call after the ASP.NET session has timed out.