Sitecore losing the client session unexpectedly

Question

On my Sitecore instance I'm authenticating a user programatically like this(adapted for this post):

[HttpGet]
        public ActionResult MyAction(MyModel model)
        {
             //custom logic
             Sitecore.Security.Authentication.AuthenticationManager.Login("extranet\\"+username,password);
        }

This works well. When I call the Sitecore.Context.User.IsAuthenticated property to check whether the user was authenticated it returns true. But that lasts until the ActionResult finishes it's execution. When I make a post or redirect the user to another page the IsAuthenticated property always returns false.

For example I have a post which gets executed on the same page declared as:

        [HttpPost]
        public ActionResult MyAction(MyModel model, string anotherParameter)
        { 
               //This always returns false
               if (Sitecore.Context.User.IsAuthenticated)
               {
                    //my custom logic. 
               }

        }

This is what my session state looks on the web.config

<sessionState mode="InProc" cookieless="false" timeout="20" sessionIDManagerType="Sitecore.SessionManagement.ConditionalSessionIdManager">
  <providers>
    <add name="mongo" type="Sitecore.SessionProvider.MongoDB.MongoSessionStateProvider, Sitecore.SessionProvider.MongoDB" sessionType="Standard" connectionStringName="session" pollingInterval="2" compression="true" />
    <add name="mssql" type="Sitecore.SessionProvider.Sql.SqlSessionStateProvider, Sitecore.SessionProvider.Sql" sessionType="Standard" connectionStringName="session" pollingInterval="2" compression="true" />
  </providers>
</sessionState>

As far as I can tell this is fine and should make the session last for 20 minutes.

Any thoughts on what could be wrong here?

Answer 1

Try to pass the persistent paramenter:

Sitecore.Security.Authentication.AuthenticationManager.Login("extranet\\" + username, password, persistent: true, allowLoginToShell: false);

Answer 2

Sitecore asynchronously checks for robot detection and everything goes well then it reset the session according to your configuration.

Please observe on your first request, Sitecore will make an ajax request to check something, it this not happening properly then you have to figure out why this is not happening please check that visitor identification is working properly.

Probably sitecore will make request "/layouts/system/VisitorIdentificationCSS.aspx"