View state vs Hidden field in asp.net

Question

How can we take decision for viewstate and hidden field in ASP.NET.

In my case i am using page cross post back and by using public properties of first page i am accessing them in second aspx page.

After getting public variable in second aspx page i need to access those value in second page but as soon as i do postback in second page, i am not able to find those value.

Hence to solve this issue i have two solution either use viewstate in second page or using hidden field in second page.

I am not able to decide which one should i use?

Answer 1

The approach is quite the same. Only difference should be the size of stored info (viewstate is using [sometimes encrypted] base64 while hidden fields use plain text unless you encode them yourself), and viewstate allows you to make sure the data was not tampered with thanks to the default validation it has in place.

Answer 2

If the data is small and you want to manipulate the value based on some client-side behaviour, hidden field will be useful.