Best practice for session persistent data to minimise post backs

My question is how to best handle temporary data for an session. The scenario is similar to a shopping cart or like a bet slip. While the user is navigating the site and adding items with unique ID's. I'm only interested in the data collected this way if the user wants to commit it.

I'm developing in ASP .Net 3.5 with jQuery,JSON and a MS SQL DB.

As I see it there are a few possible ways to do this.

• Perform a full post back to the server. Store every selections, update page controls accordingly.
• Send selectio开发者_如何学Pythonns via a Ajax request back to the server and update displaying control.
• Build all functionality in JavaScript and store all values in a session cookie. Nothing being sent to server until user choose to commit.

I really want to consider performance here but I don't want to end up with 1000's of lines of JavaScript code..

Any suggestions of the best implementation with pro's and con's?

Cheers, Stefan

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Storing things in a session cookie is not a good idea, because that will be sent back to the server with every request. If you could find a way to store the state on the client without using a cookie, then you might have a viable client-centric option, but i can't think of anything portable off the top of my head. There are things in HTML5 and Flash that can do it, but you don't want to go there - yet, in the case of the former, and at all, in the case of the latter.

I'd use AJAX to post back to the server (with graceful degradation to a full post for browsers that can't handle that), then store the information in volatile memory there - ie not in the database. Write it to the database only when you need to. This is very easy to do in Java (you can associate information with the session), so i assume ASP.net has some way to do it too.

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All three possibilities look good to me. The question, however, is: how much traffic do you expect?

Each of the options you presented suits better to a given scenario. Let's say you will have A LOT (thousand of thousands) users and not a lot of hardware available then you should probably try to minimize the number of requests to your app and store data in the client as much as possible before sending it to the server.

If it is smaller application then using Session or some other central database storage would be fine.

It all depends on your requirements.