How do I turn off viewstate for good?

asp.net url viewstate clean-urls
Jon Winstanley picture Jon Winstanley · Mar 15, 2009 · Viewed 30.7k times · Source

Coming from a PHP background I love using clean URLs to grab data from one service to another.

However, on some of my ASP.NET projects I get the horrible ViewState parameter in my URLs.

Is there a way to turn this off globally?

What affect will this have on my ASP.NET app?

Answer

eglasius picture eglasius · Mar 15, 2009

You can turn off viewstate for the whole site like this:

    <system.web>
<pages enableViewState="false" />

That said, you shouldn't be getting it on the url. ViewState is a hidden field that is sent to the server with a postback (which normally uses post). It keeps the state of the controls when the page was rendered to the client, sending it with each postback. If it works for the application you could switch to use post instead (the problem form is surely using get), if not take a look at Jon's answer.

Check this link for more information on how the viewstate fits into the asp.net life cycle: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms972976.aspx.

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