State management is the process by which you maintain state and page information over multiple requests for the same or different pages.

Types of State Management

There are 2 types State Management:

Client – Side State Management

This stores information on the client's computer. The techniques available to store the state information at the client end are listed down below:

a)    View State: ViewState is the mechanism that allows state values to be preserved across page postbacks. Values stored in view state will loss with the page.

Example:

ViewState ["clickCounter"] = 1;     //set value in ViewState field

       int value = (int) ViewState ["clickCounter"];   //get value from ViewState field

b)    Hidden fields: – Like view state, hidden fields store data in an HTML form without displaying it in the user's browser. The data is available only when the form is processed.

Example:

<inputtype="hidden"runat="server"id="hdnValue"/> //creating hidden field

    hdnValue.Value="admin";                   //set value in hidden field

                  string value=hdnValue.Value;            //get value from hidden field

c)     Cookies: Cookies store a value in the user's browser that the browser sends with every page request to the same server. Cookies are the best way to store state data that must be available for multiple Web pages on a web site.

Example

HttpCookie cookie = newHttpCookie ("user", "abc"); // create cookie with the name  
                                                      and value    

       cookie.Expires = DateTime.Now.AddHours (2);      // specifies cookie expires after  
                                                           two hours                                                                         

Response.Cookies.Add (cookie);                   // specifies cookie and its value   
    is added

       HttpCookie cook = Request.Cookies ["user"];      // retrieving cookie information

       string val = cook.Value.ToString ();             // store the value of cookie

d)    Query Strings: Query strings store values in the URL that are visible to the user.  Use query strings when you want a user to be able to e-mail or instant message state data with a URL.

Example:

 Response.Redirect ("Home.aspx?data=user&id=abc"); //sending two values through   
                                                    url in the field data and id  
                                                    respectively.                          

        string strData = Request.QueryString ["data"];    //get value from data field

        string strId = Request.QueryString ["id"];        //get value from id field

Server – Side State Management

a)    Application State:Application state is stored in memory on the server and is faster than storing and retrieving information in a database. Application state is a useful place to store small amounts of often-used data that does not change from one user to another.

Example:
      Application["noVisitors"] = 1; // set value in the field name noVisitors

         int val = (int)Application["noVisitors"]; //get value from application field

b)    Session State: ASP.NET Session state provides a place to store values that will persist across page requests.  Values stored in Session are stored on the server and will remain in memory until they are explicitly removed or until the Session expires.

Example:

Session["emailid"] = "abc@gmail.com";     // set value in the session field

string email = Session["emailid"].ToString(); // get value from the session field