>All,
>
>I am looking for a way to persist a dataset between postbacks without using session variables.
>
>Is there a best practice for this?
>
>TIA
>
>Rex

Rex,

The MS Asp.Net Step By Step book I have says the following about persisting DataSets to sessions state.

Issues:
Caching frequently used data at the session level can be efficient, but there's little automatic control over when the data is refreshed. It's very important to consider the cost of storing a data set for each user session over the cost of retrieving the dataset from the database.

Alternative:
Use the ASP.NET cache engine to cache expensive or frequently read data. The ASP.NET cache engine provides fine-grained control over how and when data is refreshed or purged from the cache.

*************
My thoughts. I was going to say, well if you persist the DataSet to XML file, and store it in SQL Server... that might work. But then, if you use SQL Server to store state, is it really that much difference. Since it would be stored in SQL Server either way.

BOb