Managing Session State

Question

I have a need to maintain the session state in the database. However I cannot access the database directly from the web server. The web server communicates with an app server which in turn has access to the database.
Is there a way to configure this? Or does a custom component have to be written.
The reason for this setup is to allow for load balancing and to allow the session of a user to be redirected from one server to another.

Answer 1

You can write a custom SessionState provider.. I think it's the only way.. Have a look on MSDN here.

Answer 2

Your only option is to build a custom component.

They really aren't that difficult to do as the only thing you need is for the browser to send you a value from either a cookie or the query string. What's stored is simply name value pairs.

see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa479034.aspx

Answer 3

Note that if you think you need to store sessions in the database because you are using more than one web server, that is not the case: you can use StateServer. That means you enable the session state service on one machine and set up that machine in the web.config of all your web servers so that they all use the same machine for state.

Answer 4

Use the ASP.NET Session State service, You can run this service directly on your app server - see notes on MSDN here - and configure all your web hosts to store their user session state on that central state server. The ASP.NET Session State service stores sessions in memory on the app server, and doesn't require a SQL Server database.