About Software Development

A collegue asked me a question which came from his friend. He asked the following question:

I have several pages in which I have to access the following code. I want to avoid to put all this code in every page that exists in my web application.

Private user As User</em>

‘###Loading user parameters (ID, Name, AccessRights,…)
user = Session("user")
If user Is Nothing Then
user = New User
End If

There are several solutions to this issue. I will describe 2 solutions which do the job, this does not mean that there are no other even more efficient solutions possible.

If you need a code example (both C#.NET and VB.NET) for both solutions just send me an email: wouter@goedvriend.com

Solution 1:

- Create a MasterPage with a public property which encapsulates the code to get the User from the Session.
- Add the MasterType directive to each page which needs to access the user property:

< %@ MasterType VirtualPath="~/[YourMasterPage].master" %>

This casts the Page.Master object automatically to the type of your masterpage and this results in the possibility of accessing the public user property.

MSDN link with full explanation.

Solution 2:
- Declare an Interface with a getter property with type User and have your MasterPage implement it.
- Insert the code to get the User from the Session into the getter from the interface declared.
- When calling the Page.Master cast the object to the interface you declared.
- Access the public user property through the casted object.

Conclusion:
Both solutions have the same result. The first is the default asp.net 2.0 solution and is only suitable when puting your general accessable code in your masterpage. Solution 2 gives you some more freedom implementation and decouples your functionality. Other elements in your application are able to implement this interface, so you are never entangled to your masterpage implementation.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 7th, 2009 at 16:01 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.