C#.net webform, avoid losing data from session timeout

Question

I have a user complaining about frequent timeouts in my Intranet web page. While looking for a solution I found this post:

http://forums.asp.net/t/152925.aspx?PageIndex=1

Where a poster recommends intercepting the redirect to the login page, submit the data to the database, then either reauthorize the user (without their knowledge) or redirect to login page. My goal is to avoid the situation where a user enters data in a form, walks away, then comes back to submit it, only to be told they have to login again (which is fine, if the data remained and the user was sent right back to the original webform).

Does anyone know how I can accomplish this on specific pages in my app (not all of them)?

Answer 1

Well, the easy way it to drastically lengthen the timeout specified in the web.config file.

Answer 2

It's not necessarily trivial, but you can add an ajax component that makes occasional calls to a page to keep the session alive. This way you could lengthen the session for any particular page you need to without affecting the application as a whole.

EDIT

If you really want to let the session expire, but keep the form data, you can implement

protected void Application_PostAuthenticateRequest (object sender, EventArgs e)

event handler in your global.asax.cs file. This is called before the forms authentication redirect happens, and the form data is available to your application at this point, so you can persist it to whatever medium is necessary until your user is authenticated again. In addition, if you check the

((HttpApplication)sender).Request.Path

property it will tell you which page was requested.

Answer 3

I'm going to try using cookies to preserve the data. My plan is to update the user's cookie after each control is changed, then add logic to the page_load property of the page to populate the form data after the user is logged back in.