Using ASP.NET Session for Lifetime Management (Unity)

Question

I am considering using Unity to manage the lifetime of a custom user class instance. I am planning on extending the LifetimeManager with a custom ASP.NET session manager.

Answer 1

You'd get the best bang with Unity when used with ASP.Net MVC rather than the plain old ASP.Net project. ASP.Net MVC allows you to use a container like Unity to manage the user objects, controllers, models, etc. If possible, use MVC rather than ASP.net web forms for your projects.

If I understand your question correctly, you would want to use Unity to maintain the lifetime of the object to per session. You need to implement a SessionLifetimeManager that extends LifetimeManager. The code is pretty simple and goes along these lines:

public class SessionLifetimeManager : LifetimeManager
{
    private string _key = Guid.NewGuid().ToString();

    public override object GetValue()
    {
          return HttpContext.Current.Session[_key];
    }

    public override void SetValue(object value)
    {
          HttpContext.Current.Session[_key] = value;
    }

    public override void RemoveValue()
    {
          HttpContext.Current.Session.Remove(_key);
    }
}

You could also write a similar one for PerWebRequest lifetime management.