online/offline status

sophia · December 6th, 2009, 02:22 PM

Hello friends,
whenever I browse this forum one thing that strikes to mind is that how we can check that a particular user is online/offline.
that is whenever a user is logged in then he should be shown as online to other users' browser otherwise offline.
I did google for it but did not get much, hope I will have some idea here.
Thank You friends........

Lee Dumond · December 6th, 2009, 03:52 PM

I assume you want to do this in .NET.

If so, you can use the Membership API. Briefly, here are the steps:

- Create a list to hold the online user's names.
- Call Membership.GetAllUsers to get all registered users.
- Loop through the result, checking each user's IsOnline property.
- If IsOnline = true. add them to the list you created in step 1.
- Return the list.

sophia · December 7th, 2009, 09:14 AM

Hello, Thank you for your reply. But can you please explain first step Create a list to hold the online user's names. a little bit more, that is how to create it?
Thank you once again.

Lee Dumond · December 7th, 2009, 09:26 AM

List<MembershipUser> onlineUsers = new List<MembershipUser>;

sophia · December 9th, 2009, 11:29 AM

sorry not to tell you earlier, I am using VB.NET
So can you please give a VB.NET snippet and also please tell me how to assign no. of users to the list created. (step 4)
Thank you and once again sorry.

Imar · December 14th, 2009, 01:27 PM

Here's a simple example of what Lee meant:

Code:

 
Imports System.Web.Security
...
Dim users As New List(Of String)
For Each myUser As MembershipUser In Membership.GetAllUsers()
  If myUser.IsOnline Then
    users.Add(myUser.UserName)
  End If
Next

Once this code is done, the users variable contains the names of on-line users.

Warning: with a large number of users this is likely to break. GetAllUsers has an overload that enables you to "page" your users which is a better alternative in terms of memory consumption and database locks.

You can also bypass the Membership API and use direct SQL to query just the names. Look in the Stored Procedures of a database using membership for some ideas on implementing this.

Hope this helps,

Imar