What does the __VIEWSTATE hold?

Question

I\'m sorry for maybe making such a basic question but in ASP.NET websites what does the __VIEWSTATE input field represent?

Also, is there any way to compute it\'s va

Answer 1

If you really want to understand it well, see Dave Reed's article about ViewState.

Answer 2

What do you mean by compute it's value?

Assume that it is a compressed (actually Base64 encoded) pair of your form fields/values in text form, which gets serialized into server side objects for you to work with.

Answer 3

Paul Wilson has a very good article: ViewState: All You Wanted to Know

VIEWSTATE can be deserialized with the LosFormatter class.

Answer 4

A quick Google search answers the question:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms972976.aspx

First sentence:

Microsoft® ASP.NET view state, in a nutshell, is the technique used by an ASP.NET Web page to persist changes to the state of a Web Form across postbacks.

Answer 5

The easiest way of doing this in Razor is putting this on a view:

@{
    throw new Exception();
} 

Answer 6

Do take a look at the biter script posted at http://forums.techarena.in/windows-software/1329157.htm.

That script shows how to set up and use __ViewState and other .NET variables.

That script logs into a .NET site, and gets stock values, without going thru a browser. Instead of user doing it manually, the script does it programmatically.