asp.net mvc session?

Question

Im building an admin interface for a medical records management app. My client has asked me for a way to easily select the patient the user wants to work with without having to select the patient everytime he wants to perform an action. So, say for instance he wants to store a record for the patient's current status (weight, size, etc) and then assign the same patient to a different doctor or change the company the patient currently works for.. he doesnt want to select the same patient all three times... he wants a select dropdown for patients and perform the different actions for that patient.

Im thinking this should be somehow stored in a session variable.. I have a table of patients and Im using LinqtoSql classes.... what do you reccommend?? help please.

Answer 1

You could use the session to keep a list of recently active patient records for a given users session. Every time the user selects a new patient simply add that patient's name to the "Recent" list. Since you can control the length of the session you could just allow the list to expire when the user's session does. As far as not making the user select a customer again, just have it auto-select the most recent (last entry) on the list of recent customers.

Answer 2

Personally I would consider caching as an option here. By the sounds of it you want to load ALL data for ALL patients which is fine for a small amount of data but will not scale gracefully.

Consider going to the database the FIRST time you need the patient's data, and getting your data from the cache for subsequent queries...

Answer 3

Sounds like you want to put something into Session--perhaps some of the basic "recent patient" information, such as a patient ID, patient name, etc.

Definitely take a look at this post on how to do it in a very graceful way.

Answer 4

The best way is to have the id in the route.

Use something like this when registering routes:

   routes.MapRoute(
        "Standard",                                             
        "{controller}/{action}/{PatientId}",           
        new
          {
            controller = "home", 
            action = "index", 
            PatientId = ""
          }
      );

When you select a Patient you post to an action that sets the PatientID in the RouteParameterCollection and redirect to the the action that displays the form for changing the patient. this way you always have the patientID in the URL.

Using session has some drawbacks:

• If you have 2 windows open both use the same session. This might confuse users.
• You can not bookmark a page
• Session is usually stored in memory on the appserver. This might lead to performance problems if extensively used.