How to detect browser close at server side in asp.net?

Question

I wanted to know when the browser is closed at server side in asp.net 2.0. How to detect in code behind?

Answer 1

The first thing that comes to mind is that you hook the unload event and just asynchronously post back that the browser navigated away from your site (closed the window). However, the way that HTTP is being used to build stateless web sites makes this infeasible. You just don't have a reliable way of tracking user connectivity.

Just consider how would you handle multiple sessions? If I have the same site open in many and several, tabs or windows and close down all but one how do you tell that I'm still connected? And for the fun of it, say that my browser crashed somewhere there in between.

The thing is, I could design something that would sort of solve your problem. However, it's never going to be reliable because HTTP doesn't have a built-in control mechanism for connectivity.

I have to answer this question, with a follow up question. Why do you need to know when the browser window closes?

If you need to do some resource clean up there's two server side events, facilitated by ASP.NET that you could use more reliably. And that's Session_End or Application_End.