Better way to manage Session data

Question

I need to persist in Session some data. I wrote many properties like that:

public List<string> FillOrder
{
    get { return Session[SessionKeys.QueryFillOrder] as List<string> ?? new List<string>(); }
    set { Session[SessionKeys.QueryFillOrder] = value; }
}

When I have to consume this data I have to write code like that:

List<string> fillOrder = FillOrder;
fillOrder.Add(accordion.ID);
FillOrder = fillOrder;

that seems to me so ugly, because I would prefer to do that:

FillOrder.Add(accordion.ID);

but this way my value would not be saved back in Session.

Can you think of any better way to achieve the same result?

Thank you very much!

Answer 1

I always use a wrapper class around the ASP.NET session to simplify access to session variables:

public class MySession
{
    // private constructor
    private MySession()
    {
       FillOrder = new List<string>();
    }

    // Gets the current session.
    public static MySession Current
    {
      get
      {
        var session = (MySession)HttpContext.Current.Session["__MySession__"];
        if (session == null)
        {
          session = new MySession();
          HttpContext.Current.Session["__MySession__"] = session;
        }
        return session;
      }
    }

    // **** add your session properties here, e.g like this:
    public List<string> FillOrder {get; set; }
    public string Property1 { get; set; }
    public DateTime MyDate { get; set; }
    public int LoginId { get; set; }
}

This class stores one instance of itself in the ASP.NET session and allows you to access your session properties in a type-safe way from any class, e.g like this:

MySession.Current.FillOrder.Add(accordion.ID);

int loginId = MySession.Current.LoginId;

string property1 = MySession.Current.Property1;
MySession.Current.Property1 = newValue;

DateTime myDate = MySession.Current.MyDate;
MySession.Current.MyDate = DateTime.Now;

This approach has several advantages:

• you can initialize your session variables in the constructor (i.e. new List<string>)
• it saves you from a lot of type-casting
• you don't have to use hard-coded session keys throughout your application (e.g. Session["loginId"]
• you can document your session items by adding XML doc comments on the properties of MySession