Setting Session Variables

Setting Session Variables in a Report definition is very easy:  

First, the Set Session Variables element is added to the definition, as shown above. Its optional attributes are also shown and can be very useful. The Condition attribute lets you specify a formula which has to evaluate to True for the Session Variables to be set. The Set First Time Only attribute, if set to True, causes the Session Variables to be set the first time the definition is processed but does not reset them if the report is reloaded during the current user session. The default value is False.  

Next, a Session Parameters child element is added. This element lets you enter a list of Session Variable names and their values. As shown above, the values can be numbers, strings, tokens, or even formulae. A formula can be particularly useful here, especially if you want to make the Session Variable value dynamic in order to, for example, increment a counter or a date each time the report is reloaded. This is one of the few opportunities you have to make a web application variable behave like a normal programming variable.  

Setting Session Variables in a Process Task

In the next example, we'll examine a similar operation in a Process definition (only available in Logi Info).  

In a task shown above, a Procedure.Set Session Vars element has been added, with a child Session Parameters element. A Session variable, "PhoneNo", has been created, with a value that uses a formula to remove any non-numeric characters from a Request variable passed to the task.  

Later in the task, we can see how the @Session token is used to provide the "cleaned up" phone number value as a parameter for a SQL Stored Procedure. As we've seen, Session Variables can be used in Report and Process definitions to produce very dynamic, global values.  

Setting Session Variables in Global.asax

In a .NET Logi application, you can also set Session Variables in the application's Global.asax file by adding code like this:

<% Session("webpath") = Request.ServerVariables("URL") %>

This code takes advantage of ASP.NET objects to assign the URL of the application to the "webpath" Session variable. In the application, the value can be accessed using the @Session.webpath~ token.