ASP.NET - How to efficiently create dynamic user-specific menu from database

Question

this is my first time posting on StackOverflow but this site is awesome. Thanks in advance for any help you're able to give.

I have a site which gives users access to different pages based on their permissions so each user needs to have their menu dynamically generated when they log in. However, a user's options probably won't be changing very often.

The site currently has a Master page which pulls a list of their pages from the database and builds a menu. It does this each time the user loads a page.

I wanted to cut down on calls to the database so started putting the menu data into a Session variable. I was hoping someone more experienced could help me out in making sure that this is the best way to do it. I think I would prefer a way to store it on the user's machine and not the server.

I have this is my Master's Page Load:

User u = new User(Page.User.Identity.Name, Globals.getCnString());
        DataTable menu;
        if(Session["MENU"] == null)
        {
            Session["MENU"] = u.getMenu();
        }
        menu = (DataTable)Session["MENU"];

        foreach (DataRow r in menu.Rows)
        {
           //build menu code here.
        }

Thanks again!

Answer 1

If user's options won't be changing very often, why don't you build the menu only when the change happened, save it in user's profile table (in html format), and pass it to a literal control in the Master page instead of the menu, in that way you'll not store it on the user's machine(which is not recommended for a website).