What do you do when you can't use ViewState?

Question

I have a rather complex page that dynamically builds user controls inside of a repeater. This repeater must be bound during the Init page event before ViewState is

Answer 1

I have to explicitly null the session value during non postbacks in order to emulate how ViewState works.

I'm still foggy as to why you can't store whatever object(s) you are binding against in session. If you could store that object in session the following should work:

1. On first load bind your top user control to the object during OnPreInit. Store the object in session. Viewstate will automatically be stored for those controls. If you have to bind the control the first time on Page_Load that is ok, but you'll end up having two events that call bind if you follow the next step.
2. On postback, rebind your top user user control in the OnPreInit method against the object you stored in session. All of your controls should be recreated before the viewstate load. Then when viewstate is restored, the values will be set to whatever is in viewstate. The only caveat here is that when you bind again on the postback, you have to make 100% sure that the same number of controls are created again. The key to using Repeaters, Gridviews etc... with dynamic controls inside of them is that they have to be rebound on every postback before the viewstate is loaded. OnPreInit is typically the best place to do this. There is no technical constraint in the framework that dictates that you must do all your work in Page_Load on the first load.

This should work. However, if you can't use session for some reason, then you'll have to take a slightly different approach such as storing whatever you are binding against in the database after you bind your control, then pulling it out of the database and rebinding again on every postback.

Am I missing some obvious detail about your situation? I know it can be very tricky to explain the subtleties of the situation without posting code.

EDIT: I changed all references to OnInit to OnPreInit in this solution. I forgot that MS introduced this new event in ASP.NET 2.0. According to their page lifecycle documentation, OnPreInit is where dynamic controls should be created/recreated.