Hi all,
  this may be dumb but....

  Is it good practice to always use the session variable
  to store datasets, records, objects, etc so that they
  can be passed between web pages ?

  Is this how the big boys do it ? Like in applications
  where you add stuff to a shopping cart and then go to the
  checkout page ? ie you create a memory object that holds
  list items and send it to the session object.

  Or is there another way ?

Cheers.
Chas.

Hey,

Use the Cache. This is a great option because it uses memory for it. Most apps use a database to store the information such as a shopping cart.

Brian

Am I right in thinking that caching is useful is many
browsers might request the same page over a short period of time - thus saving disc/database access ?

For an individual user who may be creating an individual dynamic
list - caching wont really help - it would still be best to use
the session variable and then at some stage do a post back event
that causes this data to be wriiten to a database ?

Chas,

I can't say that I'd concider myself a "big boy" in the software world, but I've written some pretty large applications. In most cases, persisted data is written to a database. The session is used mostly for user state maintenance. I put small things in there: user id, on-the-fly settings, etc. Seldom to never do I put in objects. Anything of substance gets persisted to a "permanent" medium like a file (xml) or the DB.