View State
View State is the method to preserve the Value of the Page and Controls between round trips. It is a Page-Level State Management technique. View State is turned on by default and normally serializes the data in every control on the page regardless of whether it is actually used during a post-back.
Features Of View State
These are the main features of view state:
- Retains the value of the Control after post-back without using a session.
- Stores the value of Pages and Control Properties defined in the page.
- Creates a custom View State Provider that lets you store View State Information in a SQL Server Database or in another data store.
Advantages of View State
- Easy to Implement.
- No server resources are required: The View State is contained in a structure within the page load.
- Enhanced security features: It can be encoded and compressed or Unicode implementation.
Disadvantages of View State
- Security Risk: The Information of View State can be seen in the page output source directly. You can manually encrypt and decrypt the contents of a Hidden Field, but It requires extra coding. If security is a concern then consider using a Server-Based state Mechanism so that no sensitive information is sent to the client.
- Performance: Performance is not good if we use a large amount of data because View State is stored in the page itself and storing a large value can cause the page to be slow.
- Device limitation : Mobile Devices might not have the memory capacity to store a large amount of View State data.
- It can store values for the same page only.
When We Should Use View State
- When the data to be stored is small.
- Try to avoid secure data.