ASp.net VB - Building a who's online feature

[ossie]

Hi

I have been asked about implementing a "Who's online" feature on a clients
website but am unsure of the best practises for doing it.

All users have to log in to the site so my first thoughts were to add an
event to my login page that inserted the userID into an whosonline table in
the sql backend, and an on logout which deletes the entry.
I was also going to add an on session end event in my global.asax to remove
the user from the DB if they hadn't physically logged out. The problem I can
see with this is that if users don't log out and just close the browser etc
my who's online is going to be 20ish minutes behind.

Any one have any thoughts on a better way of acheiving this?

Thanks

[RobGT]

If you can guarantee use of Internet Explorer browser only, you could make
use of the onBeforeUnload event to trigger a database update if/when the
user just closes their browser window/navigates away from the page.
Other than that, I'm afraid that all you can really do is to set a lower
session timeout and live with the who's online feature being out slightly...

Oh - unless .NET allows you to do more that classic asp does in this regard
(I just spotted the .net in the subject... duh! :)
HTH
Rob
[url]http://robgt.com[/url]

[ossie]

Thanks Rob
According to our stats it's a 60/30 split with I.E/Firefox with about 10%
using other browsers.

I'll keep thinking & looking around


"RobGT" <rob@lighthouseuk.removeme.net> wrote in message
news:d2h19k$pqm$1@forums.macromedia.com...

> If you can guarantee use of Internet Explorer browser only, you could make
> use of the onBeforeUnload event to trigger a database update if/when the
> user just closes their browser window/navigates away from the page.
> Other than that, I'm afraid that all you can really do is to set a lower
> session timeout and live with the who's online feature being out
> slightly...
>
> Oh - unless .NET allows you to do more that classic asp does in this
> regard (I just spotted the .net in the subject... duh! :)
> HTH
> Rob
> [url]http://robgt.com[/url]
>
>