Best Practices for Passing Data Between Pages

Question

The Problem

In the stack that we re-use between projects, we are putting a little bit too much data in the session for passing data between pages. T

Answer 1

As a starting point, I find using the critical data elements, such as a Customer ID, best put into the query string for processing. You can easily track/filter bad data coming off of these elements, and it also allows for some integration with e-mail or other related sites/applications.

In a previous application, the only way to view an employee or a request record involving them was to log into the application, do a search for the employee or do a search for recent records to find the record in question. This became problematic and a big time sink when somebody from a related department needed to do a simple view on records for auditing purposes.

In the rewrite, I made both the employee Id, and request Ids available through a basic URL of "ViewEmployee.aspx?Id=XXX" and "ViewRequest.aspx?Id=XXX". The application was setup to A) filter out bad Ids and B) authenticate and authorize the user before allowing them to these pages. What this allowed the primarily application users to do was to send simple e-mails to the auditors with a URL in the e-mail. When they were in a big hurry, they were in their bulk processing time, they were able to simply click down a list of URLs and do the appropriate processing.

Other session related data, such as modification dates and maintaining the "state" of the user's interaction with the application gets a little more complex, but hopefully this provides a starting poing for you.