Maintaining state information across applications and pageloads

[Afroblanca]

Question #1 : I'm trying to maintain a user's state information (name, birthdate, zipcode, etc.) across applications and pageloads.

What I've been doing thus far:

1) When a user logs in, generate a sessionId.
2) Store the sessionId in a database table along with the user's userId
3) Set a cookie with the user's sessionId
4) When an application loads, read the cookie, get the userId, and load the user's state information
5) Store the user's state information in ViewState

Steps 4 and 5 must be repeated every time a user loads a new application. This causes a lot of DB accessing and does not maintain the user's state across applications. It also slows down pageloads due to high ViewState content. Is there a better way to do this? How do the "big sites" accomplish what I'm trying to do?

Question #2 : I'm trying to share site configuration data (siteName, siteId, root url, etc.) between different applications on a given website. What is the best way to do this that doesn't involve files, database tables, or querystring arguments?

I've considered using cookies to solve both Questions #1 and #2, but this seems risky and unreliable.

Thanks for your help.

[daninmanchester]

My advice would be to use caching.
Typically I don't use session variables ad what I do is request the user data from the database each time. However if the data has already been requested the method would load it from cache rather than the database.

e.g.

Friend Function LoadMember(MemberId) as MemberObject
Dim obj as Object = Cache("Member" & MemberId.ToString)



End fucntion

[daninmanchester]

cant you edit on here? I hit post by mistake! DOH

Friend Function LoadMember(MemberId) as MemberObject
Dim obj as Object = Cache("Member" & MemberId.ToString)
if obj is nothing then
' load from database and add to cache
cache("Member" & MemberId.tostring) = MemberObject1
return MemberObject1
else
return ctype(obj,MemberObject)
end if
End fucntion