Java EE (Java Enterprise Edition) General Discussion

Hi,
Setting the session max inactive interval using session setMaxInactiveInterval() will set it for the whole session and not for a single page. Suppose you use:
HttpSession session = request.getSession(true);
session.setMaxInactiveInterval(100);

Then your session will timeout after 100 seconds till you validate the session again.

HTH

Hi HTH,

Thank you so much for your reply. But how do you validate a session? I know there's a session.invalidate() but there doesn't seem to be a session.validate(). I want to reset the session time, so to speak, at each page. But I want to continue the session, not get a new session.

Thank you again!

I suppose what I could do is set the max inactive interval to the current max inactive interval PLUS the time for the current page. Is there any other way?

Thanks!

to see if a session is timed out you can do a few different things.

at the time the session is generated, you can store the session id in the session object as a string. then you can check for that on other pages. if you get a null returned on a session.getAttribute, then the session has timed out. if someone has a better way of doing this, let me know :) there also exists the method "isNew" but i have had limited success with this in detecting timed out sessions.

as for "resetting" the session TTL (time to live), this is done automatically each time a new page is loaded for that session. if you wish to change that TTL you need to call the function to set the time to a different amount.

Jetsam,

I'm a bit confused. Please bear with me. Are you saying that you disagree with the first answer? That if I set the max inactive interval to 100 seconds, EACH page will have 100 seconds to live? I'm referring to this passage:
Thanks!

think of it this way... every time someone requests something from the server they have x amount of time to request something else before they are timed out. that amount of time is what you are setting. each time they ask for someone else, that time is reset back to its original setting and the clock starts ticking again.

now, each page you have could change that value if you wanted to.

i said ...
i dont want to confuse you. it is reset to the last value either you told it, or its default.

:)

if im making no sense, which i probably am, i could explain better on AIM or MSN Messenger if you have either.

Ah. Ok. This is what I believed. I just wanted to make sure. Pheew! So, ok, I have a form. When I press submit, that next page restart the clock, yes?
Yes, this part I understand. :)

Thank you so much!

yup. because you requested more data from the server, your time out period gets reset again and starts counting down.

Thank you for confirming everything! Cheers!