ASP.NET State Management
Daniel Cazzulino, Victor Garcia Aprea, James Greenwood, Chris Hart · Apress eBooks · 2004
B ack in Chapter 1, we discussed the particularities of web applications and the stateless nature of the HTTP protocol. Every time a page is requested, the server processes it, returns it to the client, and completely forgets about it. The same happens on the client side: every page received is a completely new one, even if it comes from the same URL after a postback, for example. It’s immediately evident that if you want to keep some information about the current users while they use the application—login information, selected items in a shopping basket, preferences about the site, filled form fields, selected values, and so on—you need some sort of mechanism from ASP.NET or HTML itself, as HTTP (the protocol) doesn’t provide one. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.