Question

Accessing and killing one session from another

Asked by: techprocess

The current application I am working on requires that each user can only login in one session only. The app is written in ASP.NET and uses a sql server 2000 as the db. If the user logs in with the same username and password then he should get a prompt that someone is already logged in with this id. Do you want to continue? If yes then the former user's session should be removed and new session beassigned to later one.

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Asked On
2007-08-22 at 06:14:25ID22779286
Topics

WebApplications

,

.NET Framework 2.x

,

Programming for ASP.NET

Participating Experts
2
Points
500
Comments
9

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Answers

 

by: strickddPosted on 2007-08-22 at 06:41:49ID: 19745996

There is no way to access a separate session from the current session. The only way you can really do what you want to do is clear all sessions by resetting the application. I'm sure this is not what you want to do so the next option is to just let the existing session timeout. Usually if someone doesn't log out and then comes back a while later they will be timed-out anyway. Also, once a user closes the browser their session will be closed anyway.

 

by: DreamMasterPosted on 2007-08-22 at 07:25:46ID: 19746390

You could do it in another way though.

Just keep track of the users login and logout time (that way you might even check session lengths for future reference or statistics) by placing this information in a database table.

So as soon as your user logs in you check in the database whether a user with this userID is still logged in, by checking the last entry with this userID and checking whether or not a loggedout time has been filled in. If not then the user is still logged in and either needs to be logged out. So, you set it's loggedout time to that time...

As soon as the user that was logged in now changes pages you check whether or not he is logged in..in this case he is not, as he has already been logged out, and so you direct that user to the login page.

My only real problem with this is that if you have someone kicked...they may not understand why they have been kicked, and will not understand that they should not log in at this time or they will rekick that other user..

Also make sure that you set the loggedout time as soon as the user closes his browser (using the global.asax Session_End method)

That's about it..I hope it helps.

Regards,
Max.

 

by: techprocessPosted on 2007-08-22 at 22:47:53ID: 19751801

Thanks for your solution Dreammaster but i have thought of this solution before. the only thing i dont want to do is hit the database on every request to check whether the user is allowed to access so i want to explicitly kill the other user's session.
As nothing is impossible there has to be some way that we can kill other user's Session ID.

 

by: DreamMasterPosted on 2007-08-23 at 01:38:02ID: 19752374

Well, nothing may be impossible...but killing another users session...is! Trust me, if it was possible...there would have been many people that knew the answer to that one.

I know with a 99.99999% certainty that you cannot kill the session of a specific user from someone else's session. There may be tools available for a sever administrator to check which sessions are running on a website and kill one of them from there (although I highly doubt that there will be) but you can definately NOT do it from someone else's session.

Regards,
Max.

 

by: DreamMasterPosted on 2007-08-27 at 00:04:47ID: 19774036

Just another question by the way? If you don't want to hit the database...how will you know what sessionID the other user has? I mean it's not like you have access to another user's session data, so you can't check it that way..

Regards,
Max.

 

by: techprocessPosted on 2007-08-29 at 21:26:03ID: 19797466

What we can do is we can maintain one Application variable where we will store the userid'd who logged into the system,in case we find a copy of user id who is logging into the system we can show him a msg stating that already logged in.But we cannot close old session instead we can close new logged in session.

 

by: DreamMasterPosted on 2007-08-29 at 22:03:22ID: 19797567

Yes, you can store an application variable which will remain the same throughout the application....but you can't close a session with that Id...I wish you could, but unless everyone I know is wrong...you can't...

Regards,
Max.

 

by: DreamMasterPosted on 2007-08-29 at 22:04:59ID: 19797571

You'd have to store an array of sessionID's into that application variable by the way...cause there could be more than one user on. Considering the fact that the application variables remain the same for everyone using the application, it would be no use to just store one sessionid in there....

 

by: techprocessPosted on 2007-08-29 at 22:21:41ID: 19797632

It may work in some scenario ,but our requirement is to clean up the session for better resourse utilization.

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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