I am experiencing the same problem (session variables suddenly disappear) in an ASP.NET application. The odd thing is that I am doing development on my WinXP laptop and the session variables work fine (both for me and external users accessing the site). However, as soon as I move the application up to our staging server (a Win2003 box with IIS6), the missing session variables start happening. Another developer I know encountered a similar problem when moving from a Win2000/IIS5 server to Win2003/IIS6 so the problem appears to be related to Win2003 and IIS6.

As with the other posts, all session variables suddenly go away, often within seconds of being set. There is no consistency and it does not happen in the same place every time. Also, on some occasions, I have seen the session variables disappear for one page in the site and then re-appear for a different page (or even the same page) later on. Again, it does not seem to be tied to any specific page in the site. This happens with both Cookie and Cookieless session vars.

If anyone has more information or a solution to this problem, please post it.

My problem was encountered on Win2K running IIS 5.1. That's probably of no help except to point out to any listening higher powers this seems to occur on more than one platform combination.

I recently saw a KB article that described missing session variables in relation to "illegal characters" in the server's name.

What is the name of your server? Does it contain an underscore?

Imar
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Imar Spaanjaars
Everyone is unique, except for me.
While typing this post, I was listening to: Legs (Graham Massey Mix) by Art Of Noise (Track 9 from the album: The Fon Mixes) What's This?

All of our machines, both development and production, are less than 8 characters, alphanumeric only. The application subdirectory involved was similar. I was storing special characters like slashes (for dates), however, but I would hope session variables would be able to accept those.

I have recently upgraded to XP Pro and the next time I'm asked to write an ASP app, I may try using session variables again just to see if that fixes the problem. If so, I'll leave a note. But I'm not hopeful.

I had same problem as well before. The session was gone either after i open a connection to db or close it (i forgot which one).
then my friend moved my access db from bin directory to the root directory and miraculously it works!

Hope it helps

Hmmm, that seems reasonable to me. I think the .NET Framework monitors the Bin folder for changes. As soon as you change, say, the Web.Config file, the changes are picked up immediately because someone is watching that file, and restarts ASP when the file has changed.

I always thought it was monitoring individual files, but come to think of it, it makes a lot more sense if it is monitoring the entire folder. Since accessing the database will either change the database file, or generate a .lck inside that folder, a change is noticed, and the ASP.NET application is silently restarted.

I never ran into this because I do not store my database in the Bin folder, but in a /Databases folder instead, but storing it in the Bin folder can certainly cause session variables to get lost. Interesting....

Imar
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Imar Spaanjaars
Everyone is unique, except for me.
While typing this post, I was listening to: Bliss by Muse (Track 2 from the album: Origin of symmetry) What's This?

I wish that was the case, but in my instance the code is referencing a SQL Server database stored under its own subdirectory structure. Don't think IIS is looking for changes in SQL Server's folders, just its own.

I've not written any ASP apps against an Access database, either. So I don't know how that might factor in.

In a related question, though, I was under the impression Access couldn't handle large quantities of simultaneous users? A C/S system I worked on years ago experienced frequent corruptions that were attributed to too many users. Have folks had success with Access behind ASP applications or is the consensus that a larger 'server' based database is necessary to handle very large numbers of simultaneous connections?

I never use access for anything that would expect more than a few users at one time.. and only then when it will be primarially read-only.


Hal Levy
Web Developer, PDI Inc.

NOT a Wiley/Wrox Employee

Yeah, neither do I. The technical limit for an Access database is 255 concurrent users. However, in reality, you'll reach this limit much and much sooner.
I have seen a lot of sites / applications where the app came down to a grinding halt when the number of concurrent users got around 20 or so. But I have also seen sites that reach Access's limit with less and others with more users. It all depends on the scenario. A (mostly) read-only site can obviously handle more users than an on-line order entry system.

But just like Hal, I'd consider SQL Server for most "professional" scenarios.

Cheers,

Imar
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Imar Spaanjaars
Everyone is unique, except for me.
While typing this post, I was listening to: The Ideal Crash by dEUS (From the album: The Ideal Crash) What's This?

what is sql server? how to use it?