Thursday, September 6, 2012

Snippet to clear session for user

During testing, I sometimes log in as different user to test hide/whens/etc. I used to delete the SessionID cookie in the browser to clear session scoped beans/sessionScope variables. Today, I looked for a solution to automate this. This line will clear all objects related to a session:
facesContext.getExternalContext().getSession( false ).invalidate();
If you want to clear session when logged in user changes for the current "XPages" session, here's the snippet I use (put the code in afterPageLoad or beforePageLoad):
// Reset session when user changes
var currentUserName = sessionScope.currentUserName;
var userName = session.getEffectiveUserName();
if( currentUserName && userName !== currentUserName ){
 facesContext.getExternalContext().getSession( false ).invalidate();
}   
sessionScope.currentUserName = userName;
I would think this is better than deleting the cookie, as the server is immediately notified that it should flush the objects bound to the session. When I delete the cookie, I believe that the objects are kept in memory until a specified timeout.