c# - No access to the Session information through SignalR Hub. Is my design is wrong?

Question

I've just discovered you can't access the current session within the SignalR Hub.

Simplified my scenario: I've tried to write a chat.

The name of the current user was kept within the Session.

I've used SignalR to update (a group of connections) about every new message.

Now I see that I can't access the name of the current user through the hub.

I guess there might be some workarounds, but is that implement my design was wrong?

Should I've not used SignalR for that purpose? Or should I not use Session in this way?

Answer 1

You shouldn't use Session with SignalR (see SignalR doesn't use Session on server). You identify logical connections by their connection id which you can map to user names.

The underlying problem is that access to SessionState is serialized in ASP.NET to ensure state consistency, so each request to the hub would block other requests. In the past, limited read-only access (I assume (but can't confirm since the gist is gone) by setting EnableSessionstate to read-only, which prevents the locking problem I described) was possible, but support for this was dropped. Also see various other places where the SignalR team made similar statements. Lastly: there's a statement in the official documentation about HTTPContext.Current.Session.