Non-Interrupting Logins

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My application is a simple create/update/delete system, with user
authentication. Everything is working well, except session timeouts are
creating user-experience nightmares.

The standard workflow of my application is as follows:

Login -> View Items -> Edit Item -> Save Item

The following should be noted about each step:
1) Login
The login is a customized version of the FormsAuthentication. It
accesses a database to retrieve user information, and uses
FormsAuthentication.SetAuthCookie/Server.Transfer instead of
FormsAuthentication.RedirectFromLoginPage.
2) View Items
A list of items is retrieved from a database and displayed in a DataList
control.
3) Edit Item
The user clicks on an edit button in the DataList control from step (2),
and is taken to a separate form to edit the information (in-line editing is
not being used).
4) The user clicks a save button, which persists the data to the database
and takes the user back to the View Items page.

As I said, everything is working. The problem I am having is when the user
takes a long time editing the item and his session times out. In such a case
the flow is as follows:

Login -> View Items -> Edit Item -> Click Save -> Login -> Edit Item

This is all well and good, except that upon return to the Edit Item page,
the form values the user has entered are no longer there, so the user must
re-enter the data. Ideally the flow should be:

Login -> View Items -> Edit Item -> Click Save -> Login -> Persist Data to
DB -> View Items

assuming validation passes, otherwise

Login -> View Items -> Edit Item -> Click Save -> Login -> Edit Item

with the form filled out and any viewstate-dependant controls rehydrated.

Any ideas as to how I can accomplish this?

Thanks,
--kaburke


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