ASP.NET randomly losing session values

Question

I\'ve been searching for answers for quite some time on this as it continues to plague me. We store user login info and other data about the user\'s current activities in Sessi

Answer 1

For anyone that is interested, or dealing with similar issues, I wanted to follow up with the cause of my problem here.

I implemented NCache out-of-process state server for Application Cache and Session State about 7 or 8 months ago. Unfortunately, moving the session out-of-process has not had any impact of my problem of losing random session variables during report selection on my site. And, as I had been unable to replicate this problem, I had not put more effort into trying to fix it until recently when another problem made the light go off in my head.

To get to the point - I was not overwriting the session variables somewhere that I didnt realize, but the problem was the user was opening up a second (or third) tab to compare report selection options side by side. We have several custom reports where the user can select multiple options to generate custom reports (think of it like a wizard control where there are several steps to create a custom report). If a user is on step 3 of 5, and then opens a new tab and starts going through the report selection process again, the new selections are overwriting the old selections b/c the 2 tabs shared the same session. I verified this was the case by opening multiple tabs and stepping through the selection process.

I am in the process of trying to distinguish between multiple report runs so that the selections for one report are stored using a unique session key from other report selections. That is proving difficult as well, but is not really related to the problem I thought I was having with missing session data.

If anyone finds this post and thinks they are losing session data randomly and cant replicate it, try debugging your site and opening multiple tabs. Stepping through both tabs at the same time illuminated the problem for me.

HTH