Delay Web Request using HttpRuntime.ProcessRequest

R

Ross Dempster

Hi everyone, this is quite involved but if anyone can help (or just
likes a challenge!) i would very much appreciate it.

Quick intro :
I have forms based authentication (though i do it manually - not with
the built in gizmo). The session times out after 30 minutes.

The problem :
User may take longer than 30 minutes to fill out the form. They would
need to log back in on submission - but if I redirect then they loose
what they typed.

What I want to do :
When i detect a login has expired ...
1) store request
2) send to login page
3) on successful login: re-run the original request

nb. i cannot simply process the request as normal and store control
values before redirecting because some of my form (drop-down lists
etc) has content which is derived from the logged-in user. i have to
get a successful login before i process the page. i also cannot use
non-forms authentication because IIS interferes with it and my host
will unlikely modify their configuration.

Possible solution :
Imagine I have code in place to package up the request (inc headers
etc). This data will be passed via the login page (through a
server-side transfer) to the user's browser (in a hidden field). When
the user submits the log-in, the original request data comes back in
the hidden field ... this part i think i can do.

On to the hard part :
My code needs to use HttpRuntime.ProcessRequest to process this
original request and send the response back to the browser. I can use
the response stream from the current login submission to pass data
back, but i cannot get the ProcessRequest function to work!

I am trying this currently without any of the supporting framework i
described above. That is to say: I have a single .aspx form which
attempts to ProcessRequest another page (using the Response.Output
stream to send back output).

Where it all goes wrong:

approach 1 - using SimpleWorkerRequest: this breaks either with a
"null reference" exception or "unable to override application path"
depending on what constructor you use. The exception is in the runtime
so i don't think it is my fault. If I start the request in another
application domain then it works but i cannot easily get the response
stream back to my original domain. Also, I do not want the performance
hit of running multiple domains - esp. when the domain I am executing
in is an HttpRuntime capable domain in the first place!

approach 2 - deriving HttpWorkerRequest: where to start? there is no
guide that tells you the bare minimum of functions you need to
implement - and there are too many to implement them all. I tried
sticking debug output in them all to see which ones are actually
called and implementing just those. Now the problem is that the
documentation on them is so thin that it is difficult to know exactly
what you are trying to implement (eg. "GetUriPath: Returns the virtual
path to the requested URI." - now does that include host, page name ?)
Anyway, I've implemented these as best i can and now the runtime
causes a stack overflow. It repeatedly calls GetAppPathTranslated,
more than 20 thousand times in fact. I would hazard a guess that my
GetAppPathTranslated is broken but I have tried as many combinations
of returing this path as i can think of! eg. with page-name, without
page-name, fully-qualified, relative etc.

Anyway, I'm all out of ideas. I know its a long shot but if anyone
knows much about this stuff I would really appreciate the help.

Thanks,
Ross.
 

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