Hello, this is my first posting!

I need to allow the user to input a series of items in a temporary way. Users must be able to view, edit and navigate those items. And finally, they should be able to accept them and only then they would be added to my database.

I have been learning ASP.NET by my own since a month ago, but I still consider myself an absolute begginner. I'm afraid I've been trying to do all this in the hard way. First I stored an ArrayList in my session, few time after I discovered I can also define it as a variable inside my page (an attribute, I suppose) and this simplified the code very much but I'm not sure about the difference/relevance of this decision.

Now I'm trying to use, without too much success, an ObjectDataSource with custom Items/Item classes so I can use data aware controls (before this, I had to make my own First/Previous/Next/Last controls from scratch and it was quite painful).

I'm not sure what I should do, I'm sure this is a common situation and there must be a simpler solution.

The first way, session, uses server memory for storage. This is fine if the app is not that big, user base is not too large and the amount of data isn't too great. Reason being is think of 1000 users building a session object for that data and you can imagine how much memory will be used up on the server. I am thinking the other way is using the viewstate. Besides the viewstate, you can also throw it into a cookie.

A dataset is what you are probably thinking of for storage but think of it as a memory variable too. Datasource needs something to connect to like an XML file or database. I would use the session object in ASP.NET. It should be that complicated of code as I just use my session as so:

Session["mysessionvariablename"] = aryMyData;

When I am done, I remove it with:
Session.Remove("Mysessionvariablename");

Memory is not a big issue with session if you clean up what you do not need anymore instead of leaving it active.