What is it all about?

This post shows you how to create a keep alive for a .NET website so people can stay logged in whilst the page is open, instead of it timing out after 20 minutes.

The basic premise to this is:

• Create a handler which responds with an OK message and doesn't allow caching.
• Add some javascript to the page to call the handler every 10 minutes.
• The call to the server side handler keeps the session alive.

Here's how to do it:

1. Create a folder in your web project called Handlers , if you don't have one already.
2. Add a class called KeepAlive.cs
3. Add the following code to the KeepAlive class
namespace CodeShare.Web.Handlers public class KeepAlive : IHttpHandler, IRequiresSessionState public void ProcessRequest(HttpContext context) context.Response.AddHeader("Cache-Control", "no-cache"); context.Response.AddHeader("Pragma", "no-cache"); context.Response.ContentType = "text/plain"; context.Response.Write("OK"); public bool IsReusable { get { return false; } } <handlers> <remove name="KeepAlive" /> <add name="KeepAlive" verb="GET" path="<mark>keep-alive.ashx</mark>" type="CodeShare.Web.Handlers.KeepAlive " /> </handlers> </system.webServer> </configuration>

//calls the keep alive handler every 600,000 miliseconds, which is 10 minutes
var keepAlive = {
    refresh: function () {
        $.get('<mark>/keep-alive.ashx</mark>');
        setTimeout(keepAlive.refresh, 6000000);
}; $(document).ready(keepAlive.refresh());