List all active ASP.NET Sessions

Question

How can I list (and iterate through) all current ASP.NET sessions?

Answer 1

http://weblogs.asp.net/imranbaloch/archive/2010/04/05/reading-all-users-session.aspx

How this works :

InProc session data is stored in the HttpRuntime’s internal cache in an implementation of ISessionStateItemCollection that implements ICollection. In this code, first of all i got CacheInternal Static Property of HttpRuntime class and then with the help of this object i got _entries private member which is of type ICollection. Then simply enumerate this dictionary and only take object of type System.Web.SessionState.InProcSessionState and finaly got SessionStateItemCollection for each user.

Summary :

In this article, I show you how you can get all current user Sessions. However one thing you will find when executing this code is that it will not show the current user Session which is set in the current request context because Session will be saved after all the Page Events...

Answer 2

I really like ajitdh's answer. Do upvote him. Here's another reference to that solution:

http://weblogs.asp.net/imranbaloch/reading-all-users-session

This got me close, but it failed to achieve my personal goal of finding the session for a particular session Id that I knew. So, for my purposes, I just added the sessionid as a session item (say Session["SessionId"] = session.SessionId on Session Start.) Then I just looked for a session with a matching value... I would have preferred to actually pull out this entry by indexing into one of the collections, but this did get it working at least.

Of course, this is all for In-Proc sessions, which I am indeed considering moving away from.

private static SessionStateItemCollection GetSession(string sessionId)
{
    object obj = typeof(HttpRuntime).GetProperty("CacheInternal", BindingFlags.NonPublic | BindingFlags.Static).GetValue(null, null);
    object[] obj2 = (object[])obj.GetType().GetField("_caches", BindingFlags.NonPublic | BindingFlags.Instance).GetValue(obj);

    for (int i = 0; i < obj2.Length; i++)
    {
        Hashtable c2 = (Hashtable)obj2[i].GetType().GetField("_entries", BindingFlags.NonPublic | BindingFlags.Instance).GetValue(obj2[i]);
        foreach (DictionaryEntry entry in c2)
        {
            object o0 = entry.Value.GetType().GetProperty("Value", BindingFlags.NonPublic | BindingFlags.Instance).GetValue(entry.Key, null);
            object o1 = entry.Value.GetType().GetProperty("Value", BindingFlags.NonPublic | BindingFlags.Instance).GetValue(entry.Value, null);
            if (o1.GetType().ToString() == "System.Web.SessionState.InProcSessionState")
            {
                SessionStateItemCollection sess = (SessionStateItemCollection)o1.GetType().GetField("_sessionItems", BindingFlags.NonPublic | BindingFlags.Instance).GetValue(o1);
                if (sess != null)
                {
                    if (sess["SessionId"] != null && ((string)sess["SessionId"]) == sessionId)
                    {
                        return sess;
                    }
                }
            }
        }
    }

    return null;
}

Answer 3

It does not seems right that there is not any class or method that provides this information. I think, it is a nice to have feature for SessionStateStoreProvider, to have a method which returns current active session, so that we don't have to actively track session life in session_start and session_end as mention by Jan Remunda.

Since I could not find any out of box method to get all session list, And I did not wanted to track session life as mentioned by Jan, I end up with this solution, which worked in my case.

public static IEnumerable<SessionStateItemCollection> GetActiveSessions()
{
    object obj = typeof(HttpRuntime).GetProperty("CacheInternal", BindingFlags.NonPublic | BindingFlags.Static).GetValue(null, null);
    object[] obj2 = (object[])obj.GetType().GetField("_caches", BindingFlags.NonPublic | BindingFlags.Instance).GetValue(obj);

    for (int i = 0; i < obj2.Length; i++)
    {
        Hashtable c2 = (Hashtable)obj2[i].GetType().GetField("_entries", BindingFlags.NonPublic | BindingFlags.Instance).GetValue(obj2[i]);
        foreach (DictionaryEntry entry in c2)
        {
            object o1 = entry.Value.GetType().GetProperty("Value", BindingFlags.NonPublic | BindingFlags.Instance).GetValue(entry.Value, null);
            if (o1.GetType().ToString() == "System.Web.SessionState.InProcSessionState")
            {
                SessionStateItemCollection sess = (SessionStateItemCollection)o1.GetType().GetField("_sessionItems", BindingFlags.NonPublic | BindingFlags.Instance).GetValue(o1);
                if (sess != null)
                {
                    yield return sess;
                }
            }
        }
    }
}