ASP
Session
The Session Object in ASP is a
great tool for the modern web
site. It allows you to keep
information specific to each of
your site's visitors. Information
like username, shopping cart, and
location can be stored for the
life of the session so you don't
have to worry about passing
information page to page.
In old web page designs you
might have to try to pass
information this information
through HTML Forms or other
methods.
ASP Session Object
Contained within the Session
Object are several important
features that we will talk about
in this lesson. The most important
thing to know about ASP's Session
Object is that it is only created
when you store information into
the Session Contents collection.
We will now look into creating and
storing information in an ASP
Session.
ASP Session Variables
To store a Session Variable you
must put it into the Contents
collection, which is very easy to
do. If you have already read the
ASP Arrays Lesson then this bit of
code will be a cinch!
Here we are saving the Time
when someone visited this page
into the Session Contents
collection and then displaying it
.
ASP Code:
<%
'Start the session and store
information
Session("TimeVisited") =
Time()
Response.Write("You visited
this site at: " &
Session("TimeVisited"))
%> |
Display:
|
You visited this site at:
7:04:15 PM |
Here we are creating two things
actually: a key and a value. Above
we created the key "TimeVisited"
which we assigned the value
returned by the Time() function.
Whenever you create a Session
Variable to be stored in the
Session Contents collection you
will need to make this Key / Value
pair.
ASP Session ID
The ASP Session ID is the
unique identifier that is
automatically created when a
Session starts for a given
visitor. The Session ID is a
property of the Session Object and
is rightly called the SessionID
property. Below we store the
user's SessionID into a variable.
ASP Code:
<%
Dim mySessionID
mySessionID =
Session.SessionID
%> |
ASP Session Timeout
A Session will not last
forever, so eventually the data
stored within the Session will be
lost. There are many reasons for a
Session being destroyed. The user
could close their browser or they
could leave their computer for an
extended amount of time and the
Session would time out. You can
set how long it takes, in minutes,
for a session to time out with the
Timeout property.
Below we set our session to
timeout after 240 minutes, which
should be more than enough time
for most web sites.
ASP Code:
<%
Session.Timeout = 240
Response.Write("The timeout
is: " & Session.Timeout)
%> |
Display:
| 
