Dynamic Web Development with Seaside

18Managing Sessions

When a user interacts with a Seaside application for the first time, a new session object is automatically instantiated. This instance lasts as long as the user interacts with the application. Eventually, after the user has not interacted with the session for a while, it will time-out — we say that the session expires. The session is internally used by Seaside to remember page-views and action callbacks. Most of the time developers don’t need to worry about sessions.

In some cases the session can be a good place to keep information that should be available globally. The session is typically used to keep information about the current user or open database connections. For simple applications, you might consider keeping that information within your components. However, if big parts of your code need access to such objects it might be easier to use a custom session class instead.

Having your own session class can be also useful when you need to clean-up external resources upon session expiry, or when you need extra behavior that is performed for every request.

In this chapter you will learn how to access the current session, debug a session, define your own session to implement a simple login, recover from session expiration, and how to define bookmarkable urls.

Copyright © 19 March 2024 Stéphane Ducasse, Lukas Renggli, C. David Shaffer, Rick Zaccone
This book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license.

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