Profile variables in asp.net tracking session with login control?

Question

I have been making a web site with a cart in asp.net using visual studio 2010. My question is concerning the Profile variable and Login Control.

I followed a pretty straight forward tutorial to add a cart to my site.

1: Shopping Cart Example

As you can see in the shopping cart tutorial, the author used a Profile to keep track of the cart.

When I was making this, I had expected the cart to stay the same with each different user login since we were using a profile and not a session variable. Fortunately, the cart would in fact reset as I logged in as different users with the login control.

So my question is, how is the Profile keeping track of the cart for each user. I'm almost certain that the login-control does not set a session variable, so I don't think the Profile object is auto-detecting a different user from the login-control... is it?

Please help me understand this, the author isn't quite clear.

Thanks a lot!

Answer 1

Basically the way it works is by using the authentication information to identify the user. So when a request comes in from an authenticated user the framework uses the username (typically in the form of an authentication cookie) to load the profile information into the current request.

In the case of the example you provided because the author is using <anonymousIdentification enabled="true"/> which allows for profile information to be available for anonymous users as well.

When an anonymous user makes a request, the AnonymousIdentificationModule module creates a GUID and writes it into a persistent cookie named .ASPXANONYMOUS. This GUID will act as the username for the purpose of the ProfileProvider.