[cle-release-team] 3 little portal session attributes

[Aaron Zeckoski]

https://jira.sakaiproject.org/browse/SAK-25857

Sakai portal places 3 flags in every ToolSession. There are many tools
(RSF and JSP based) which would not even have a session created in
memory except for the portal creating one to store these 3 flags.

1 flag (allow-neo) is always true from what I can see. There are
probably cases where it is false but I could not find any in a normal
installation of sakai 10 or trunk.

the other 2 flags are tool specific in that they have the toolId
(sakai.xxxx) or the tool context id (GUID) in the path but are
seemingly very predictable.

[0}"sakai-portal:reset-action" ->
"http://localhost:8080/portal/tool-reset/a04538aa-5f0a-40e1-a5ac-1ef33441eea2/?panel=Main"
[1}"sakai-portal:allow-neo" -> "true"
[2}"sakai-portal:help-action" ->
"http://localhost:8080/portal/help/main?help=sakai.assignment2"

It seems like the portal is using the session for caching information
which is not really related to the user session and doesn't seem to
change on a user basis (they seem to be always the same for the tool
in the current installation). Rather than storing these seemingly
identical values 100s of times for every session in the system, the
portal should use a cache of some kind to hold these values or should
simply look them up using existing stored data (from the current tool
for example).

Is there something I am missing here?
Does anyone know why these are stored in the session?
-AZ

P.S. I realize that these 3 values are not that big in memory but if
they were not being set then there would not be a ToolSession created
at all for these tools and that is a bit larger and also replicated
for every user who accesses that tool during their login to the
server.


-- 
Aaron Zeckoski - Software Architect - http://tinyurl.com/azprofile