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How To Detect Session Time Out In .Net

I was reading one article on session timeouts on one of the website and find a very interesting way of detecting session time out so I thought of publishing this useful article on my website. I hope you will find it useful.

Consider a scenario in which you are working on a website which requires user to log into the system. After working for some time the user has left the system idle for one hour. When the user come back and click on submit button a yellow screen (often called death screen) comes (or the error page) but the user have no idea why this error is coming. It is always good to give more information to the user of the system.

There is a method from which you can detect the session time out and give information to the user about it. Let us implement it.

Add the sessionstate tag in web.config file

<sessionState cookieless="false" timeout="1"></sessionState>

Here we have mentioned the session time out and whether the session is cookieless or not. Here the session time out is one minute. You can set it as per your needs.

Add following code in global.asax in Session_Start event

Dim request_session As String = Request.Headers("Cookie")
If request_session IsNot Nothing AndAlso request_session.IndexOf("ASP.NET_SessionId") >= 0 Then
' Redirect the page where you can give information to the user
End If

In the code about if the session is expired then the code in Session_Start will execute and inside the request_session variable a value like "ASP.NET_SessionId=dvvkkialn5ws13lyain33wpw" will come. It should be noted that this is the session id and will be different for different session.

So you can see that using this code you can give more information to the user about the problem.

Posted By -	Karan Gupta

Posted On -	Thursday, March 31, 2011

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