Closing a conneciton in the “unload” method

Question

I have inherited a web framework whereby the previous developer has opened and closed his database connections in the init/unload methods of the page life cycle. Essentially

Answer 1

I have no definitive knowledge about if this is safe, but I poked through the Source code for the System.Web.UI.Page class and the unload event is triggered by the private ProcessRequestCleanup() unless the request is asyncronous or a cross page request. The call to the clean up method is inside a finally block coupled to a try block that's surrounding the ProcessRequest. Process request is triggering all the page life cycle events from PreInit to Render. That would mean that Unload will always be triggered (except for in the async and cross page cases), even if an exception occur.

However I would feel very uneasy having this code in my pages since the behaviour of unload isn't exactly documented.