Session Timeout Management

After a session is timeout, all desktops and UI objects it belongs are removed. If a user keeps accessing the desktop that no longer exists, ZK will prompt the user for the session-timeout situation. ZK supports several ways to prompt the user for session timeout:

• Show an error message
• Redirect to another page
• Totally Control by running JavaScript code

You could pick one depending on your application requirement. In additions, you could configure your application to enforce the user prompting to take place, without waiting the user's activity. It is called automatic timeout.

Redirect to Another Page

Sometimes it is better to redirect to another page that gives users more complete description and guides they to the other resources, or asks them to login again. You can specify the target URI, that you want to redirect users to when timeout, in zk.xml under WEB-INF directory. For example, the target URI is /timeout.zul and then you can add the following lines to zk.xml.

<session-config>
    <device-type>ajax</device-type>    
    <timeout-uri>/timeout.zul</timeout-uri>    
</session-config>

Tip: Each device has exactly one timeout URI. For more information about zk.xml, refer to Appendix B in the Developer's Reference

In addition to zk.xml, you can change the redirect URI manually as follows.

Devices.setTimeoutURI("ajax", "/timeout.zul");

About Device: A device represents the client device. Each desktop is associated with one device, and vice versa.

If you prefer to reload the page instead of redirecting to other URI, you can specify an empty URI as follows.

<session-config>
    <device-type>ajax</device-type>    
    <timeout-uri></timeout-uri>    
</session-config>

Never Timeout

You can also prevent the session timeout by making a "keep-alive" timer. Set in zk.xml:

<session-config>
  <timer-keep-alive>true</timer-keep-alive>
</session-config>

and make a timer in your ZUL page:

<timer id="timerKeepAliveSession" repeats="true" delay="10000"/>

This will prevent the session to time out when the ZUL page is opened in the borwser. The session still timeouts when the user has navigated the browser away (or when the connection between browser and the server is broken). Instead of 10sec delay, you may set the timerKeepAliveSession more flexible, like session.getMaxInactiveInterval() * 100.

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