How define "Global" variables

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Hi everyone,

I'm developing an MVC3 application;

I need a series of variables which contains necessary info regarding the specific user (and user operations) to be accessed by almost any part of my application.

I came up with the solution of creating the necessary Static Classes, with the properties referring to specific Session Variables, so that once they are set, they'll (theorically) stay the same until changed/removed; for example:

C#

public static class TestClass
    {

        public static string TestProperty {
            get{
                return HttpContext.Current.Session["MyApplication_TestProperty"].ToString();
            }
            set{
                HttpContext.Current.Session["MyApplication_TestProperty"] = value;
            }
        }

    }

Is this a good (or at least decent) solution, or is it better to directly post it in the Hall of Shame and find another way??

Any suggestion or better solution?

Thank you in advance,
Alberto

Posted 29-Nov-11 3:42am

Alberto Biasiutti

Updated 29-Nov-11 5:38am

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Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov · Accepted Answer · 2011-11-29T05:48:00

There is nothing wrong with the idea, but there is a bug in the sample (see the fix below). Another problem is using immediate constant and repeating it twice. How are your going to support it? All constants should be explicit, except some trivial ones like 0, 1, or null. But it could be fixed like this:

C#

public static class TestClass
    {
        const string SessionId = "MyApplication_TestProperty"; //a little better

        public static string TestProperty {
            get{
                return HttpContext.Current.Session[SessionId].ToString();
            }
            set{
                HttpContext.Current.Session[SessionId] = value; //bug fixed.
            }
        }

    }

It will work but is not flexible. More universal and general approach is using the singleton pattern, see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singleton_pattern[^],
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_pattern_(computer_science)[^].

This is a good article with implementation samples in C#. I suggest you learn how to use the pattern:
http://csharpindepth.com/Articles/General/Singleton.aspx[^].

Good luck.

—SA

alexis.coles · Accepted Answer · 2011-11-29T05:57:00

If it works for what you need it for then why not.

One thing to bear in mind is that the HttpContext.Current.Session will only be availble to you in the main thread spawned by MVC. ie. if you spawn another thread to do some work these properties will not be available to you.

Using Static classes like this also mean that you will not be able to easily unit test anything that depends on a call to one of these properties.

But if you're not going to be using additional threads that make calls to these properties and you don't want to write unit tests, why not.

How define "Global" variables

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