Providing user session tracking in ASP.Net app

[david7777777777]

I'm looking for a good guide for beginner ASP.NEt programmers that explains how to build a web application where you have a user logon and the application tracks the user as they navigate the site.

This is what I'm building: an application where clients will log on and be able to view things like the computers at their office, which employee is using which computer, which software licenses are assignes to which employees, things like that. I'd like to use the session "token" or whatever it's called to help me filter database queries based on presence.

I've made ASP.Net applications that push and pull data from a MSSQL database so I'm ok with that part of the functionality. But I've yet to make a logon page that assigns a session token to a visitor, and then figure out how to use that "session token" to hepl set up SQL queries. I think I'm using the correct terminology here but I'm not even sure. Any ideas? Am I making any sense? Thanks.

 

[MikeMCSD]

Forms authentication uses cookies to allow applications to track users throughout their visit.
The only downside is the browser must have cookies enabled.
But this shouldn't be a problem for an intranet.

For more info:

http://www.15seconds.com/issue/020220.htm

 

[david7777777777]

This is perfect! Thanks. I like the cookieless authentication info. But I'm probably going to use cookies for now. Anyway, now what I need is an example or two of how this session ID is used to define queries to a database. Here's a specific function that I want to provide, and I'm not even sure that I'm doing this the smart way.

1. A client logs in to the site.
2. They are authenticated against a database (that part's already working) and receive their session ID
3. They are automatically directed to "their" home page.

What I want to do is build logic that directs each client to a customized "welcome" page based on their session ID after having been authenticated.

I also want to build SQL queries that take advantage of this session ID. For example, I'll set up a simple ASP.Net page that runs a SQL query that displays all of the computers at that client's location. I've built the database tables with a ClientID column included to help with this functionality I'm trying to build. I want the query to include the client's unique session ID (or whatever) so they only see the computers from the database table that belong to that client. Make sense? Thanks for any help and examples.