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From: Nick.Holloway@alfie.demon.co.uk (Nick Holloway)
Newsgroups: list.tomcat-user
Subject: Re: Problems with invalidate
Date: 28 Sep 2000 11:03:06 +0100
Organization: Alfie's Internet Node
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Sender: Nick.Holloway@pyrites.org.uk
Message-ID: <8qv50q$pjg$1@alfie.demon.co.uk>
References: <OFD5A0957B.5F03BBA6-ONC1256968.002D592F@LocalDomain>

Mirek.Subrt@intax.cz writes:
>  Can you tell me, why session.invalidate() and session.putValue() methods
>  work only with Tomcat 3.1 and not with Tomcat 3.2 beta 3?
> [...]
>  session.invalidate();
>  session = request.getSession (true);
>  beanX=new Vector();
>  session.putValue("beanX", beanX);

The behaviour you were relying on in 3.1 was that if the current
HttpSession was not valid, then a calling "request.getSession(true)"
would create a new session.

The documentation I have to hand (servlet23_PublicDraft1) has: 

    public HttpSession getSession(boolean create)

    Returns the current HttpSession associated with this request or, if if
    there is no current session and create is true, returns a new session.

    If create is false and the request has no valid HttpSession, this
    method returns null.

It would seem in Tomcat 3.2 once the session is associated with a request,
it remains associated, even though it is no longer valid.  This doesn't
actually conflict with the first paragraph.

However, there might be a bug in 3.2 (looking at the old copy of the
code I have) in that the following code would not return null, but will
return an invalid session, which conflicts with the second paragraph.

    session.invalidate()
    session = request.getSession(false);

Try reporting the behaviour you are seeing as a bug, and see if it
a) either gets fixed, or b) it is confirmed as being part of the
specification.

You could avoid this problem entirely by re-using the session object, but
manually clearing all elements.

    Enumeration names = session.getAttributeNames(); 
    while ( names.hasMoreElements() )
    {
	session.removeValue( (String) names.nextElement() );
    }

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 `O O'  | Nick.Holloway@pyrites.org.uk
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