Cookie-based TempData for ASP.NET Core

When developing web applications, it is common to persist some small state across a POST-redirect-GET flow (e.g. feedback message to a user after some action). In ASP.NET, TempData is the appropriate mechanism for this scenario: it persists a value until the next time it is fetched.

The default TempData implementation on ASP.NET MVC 5 and ASP.NET Core MVC is based on session storage. Another approach is to use a cookie as storage, making a client’s TempData flow with him. On ASP.NET MVC 5 I’ve been successfully using Brock Allen’s CookieTempData provider for the last few years. However, it doesn’t support ASP.NET Core.

I’ve implemented a cookie-based TempData provider for ASP.NET Core MVC. The code is available on GitHub and the library is published as a NuGet package. To replace the default provider with the cookie-based one, you just need to add a call to AddCookieTempData on your ConfigureServices method:

public void ConfigureServices(IServiceCollection services)
{
    services.AddMvc();
    services.AddCookieTempData();
}

The cookies are serialized in BSON and protected using the new data protection APIs. Feel free to provide feedback. Hope this helps!

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