[Building Sakai] Access to HTTP Session Data

[Mark J. Norton]

Thanks, Chuck.  Yeah, I kinda had a bad feeling about it as well, hence 
the shout out for confirmation. Our fall back position is to extend the 
RequestFilter and stuff Shib attributes into something we can get ahold 
of later, such as the ServletContext.

- Mark

On 1/3/2014 8:22 PM, Charles Severance wrote:
>
> On Jan 3, 2014, at 6:55 AM, Mark J. Norton <markjnorton at earthlink.net 
> <mailto:markjnorton at earthlink.net>> wrote:
>>
>>   * CONTAINER_SESSION = 0;    // don't do anything.
>>   * SAKAI_SESSION = 1;             // use the sakai wide session.
>>   * CONTEXT_SESSION = 2;       // use the context session.
>>   * TOOL_SESSION = 3;              // use the tool session, in any,
>>     else context.
>>
>> Looking at theweb.xml 
>> <https://source.sakaiproject.org/svn/portal/trunk/portal-tool/tool/src/webapp/WEB-INF/web.xml>file 
>> for the Portal, I note that the "http.session" init parameter is not 
>> specified, thus defaulting to TOOL_SESSION.
>>
>> My question is this.  If I add an init-param XML block to specify  
>> the HTTP Session at SAKIA_SESSION, for example, will it screw up all 
>> of Sakai?  For example:
>>
>>     <init-param>
>>     <param-name>http.session</param-name>
>>                 <param-value>1</param-value>
>>     </init-param>
>>
>> My concern is that by shifting the HTTP Session into the Sakai 
>> Session (or Servlet Context, etc), that it would be missing in the 
>> Tool Session, where tools expect it to be.  I'm willing to just try 
>> this and see what happens, but I though it would be useful to give 
>> someone the chance to say, "Don't do that!  Are you crazy!?!".
>
> My feeling is "Don't do this, are you crazy?"  Everything in Sakai is 
> written to expect "Tool Scoped" sessions.  Changing it in the portal 
> would be too broad of a change.   The *only* reason that I can even 
> vaguely remember in having this parameter was in case we had some old 
> legacy Servlet we would have this value in the web.xml for a single 
> servlet.
>
> My guess is that you could change it and perhaps nothing would break 
> right away in simple testing - but if tools ended up with a single 
> commingled session they might start tromping on each other's data.   
> Also the "Tool Reset" for a single tool might reset all tools.
>
> I am not 100% sure - this is just my gut reaction.
>
> /Chuck
>

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