ASP Sessions and Applications

Summary

In this article we explored the primary mechanisms provided by ASP to support persistent data. With the Application object, we can store data values that are shared by all pages and all users on our site, such as the simple hit counter that we looked at. The Session object, meanwhile, gives the power to associate persistent data with each active user on our site. In our final example, we used this to store the name of each user and display it at the top of each page.

In a public Web forum, this stored value could save the user from having to type his or her name to post a message. Used in combination with a database that stored a list of authorized users and their passwords, the system we developed in this article could be expanded to act as an access control system.

In the next article in this series, we'll look at how ASP interfaces with a relational database such as Microsoft Access. This very powerful combination of ASP with a backend database is what drives many of the hottest sites on the Internet today.