I was away from my computer all weekend, so I'm playing a bit of catchup today on my blog posts. There is no direct upper limit on the size of a viewstate. Limitations come into play when the browser limits the size of hidden fields. A capability to look for in Whidbey is chunking view-state. This is intended for situations where the view-state field becomes very large and certain firewalls or proxies may prevent a page if a hidden field is considered to be too big. In this case, a developer will be able to configure the view-state so it can be broken into multiple hidden fields. This is accomplished by the developer providing a cut-off size for a single view-state field. The cut-off size will have no upper or lower limit, although setting the cut-off to be very low will hurt performance. This can be valuable when dealing with large datasets bound to datagrids and other instances where you get a very large viewstate. Be aware though, this chunking capability doesn't replace the fact that viewstates should be kept as small as possible, and even turned off where applicable.

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Posted Tue, Feb 22 2005 6:39 AM by Raymond Lewallen