Session

Management
 Session Tracking in
Servlet
Session simply means a particular interval of
time.
Session Tracking is a way to maintain state
(data) of an user. It is also known as session
management in servlet
Http protocol is a stateless so we need to
maintain state using session tracking techniques.
Each time user requests to the server, server
treats the request as the new request. So we need
to maintain the state of an user to recognize to
particular user.
 Session Management
Whenever we make a request that request can
be processed by group of Servlets and we get
single response (in case of servlet chaining).

In general scenario we may make much number

of requests to many numbers of Servlets to get
many numbers of responses.

 By default all these 'n' number of requests and

responses are independent to each other.
Since, the protocol which we are using is http. http
protocol is a stateless protocol. A stateless protocol
is one which never maintains an identity of the client
forever.

In order to make 'n' number of independent

request and responses as a consecutive request
and responses we must use the concept of session
management or session tracking.

Session management is a process of maintaining

an identity of the client for a period of time for
multiple requests to get multiple responses across
the network.
 Session management techniques

In order to maintain an identity of the client for a

period of time, we have four types of session
management techniques;

Cookies,
HttpSession,
Hidden form field and
URL rewritten.
 Cookies

A cookie is the peace of information which

contains an identity of the client in the form of
(key, value) pair.
Key always represents cookie name and
value represents value of the cookie.

A Cookie is the class developed according to

http protocol specification for maintaining for
identity of client and it is present in a package
called javax.servlet.http.* package.
How Cookie Works
 Type of Cookie

There are two types of cookie in servlet:

1. Non-persistent Cookie.
2. Persistent Cookie
 Steps for developing Cookie
1. Create an object of a Cookie.
Cookie ck=new Cookie (String, Object);
For example:
Cookie c1=new Cookie ("fno","10");
Cookie c2=new Cookie ("sno","20");

2. Every cookie must be added as a part of response

(add the cookie to response object).
For example:
res.addCookie (c1);
res.addCookie (c2); //Here, c1 and c2 are Cookie class
objects created in step-1 and addCookie () is an instance
method present in HttpServletResponse interface.
3. In order to get the cookies we must use the
following method which is present in
HttpServletRequest.

For example:

Cookie ck []=req.getCookies ();

if (ck!=null) {
pw.println ("COOKIES ARE PRESENT"); }

else { pw.println ("COOKIES ARE NOT

PRESENT"); }
4. In order to obtain cookie name, cookie value
and to set its age we have to use the following
methods:
public String getName ();
public Object getValue ();
public void setMaxAge (long sec);
public long getMaxAge ();

Methods 1 and 2 are used for obtaining name

and value of the cookie. Methods 3 and 4 are
used for setting and obtaining the age of the
cookie.
 Simple Example of
Servlet Cookie
In this example, we are storing the name of the
user in the cookie object and accessing it in
another servlet.

As we know well that session corresponds to the

particular user. So if you access it from too many
browsers with different values, you will get the
different value.
Http Session
 Steps for developing HttpSession applications

1. Obtain an object of
javax.servlet.http.HttpSession interface.

In order to obtain an object of HttpSession we

have to use the following two methods which are
present in HttpServletRequest
 2. Put the values into HttpSession object by
using the following methods which are
present in HttpSession:

Here, String represents session variable name known as key and Object
represents session value. In HttpSession object the data is organizing in
the form of (key, value) pair.
3. Get the values from HttpSession object by
using the following methods which are present in
HttpSession:
 Hidden flow fields

Hidden form fields are also a kind of session

management technique which allows us to maintain
an identity of the client for a period of time.

<input type="hidden" name="name of the hidden

component" value="value of the hidden
component">
For example:
<input type="hidden" name="age"
value="req.getParameter ("age1")">
<input type="hidden" name="skills" value="J2EE">
 URL Rewriting
 Web browsers may refuse to save cookies
 Therefore, Servlet containers support session
management through URL rewriting
 Instead of passing the session key in a cookie,
the key is concatenated to the request URL
 Pages should contain dynamically created links
for site navigation
 thus,
users are oblivious to the session
management
URL Rewriting

request request
(no cookie)
id2 SSeerrv
response response
id1 vlleett
Web
browser 1 Session
Web server read/write

<HTML>…
<A HREF=“servletURL;sessID=id1”>
GET servletURL;sessID=id1 HTTP/1.0
…</HTML>
 The first request to Servlet
GET /dbi-servlets/Store HTTP/1.1
Accept: */*
Host: localhost
Connection: Keep-Alive
Response:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Set-Cookie: JSESSIONID=850173A82D7A7C66B28AF6F337AF73AD; Path=/dbi
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 402
Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1
 Next request to Servlet:
GET /dbi-servlets/Store HTTP/1.1
Accept: */*
Host: localhost
Connection: Keep-Alive
Cookie: JSESSIONID=850173A82D7A7C66B28AF6F337AF73AD

Response:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 330
Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1
 Servlet URL Rewriting
 Use the following methods of the doXXX response object to
rewrite URLs:
- String encodeURL(String url)
 Use for HTML hyperlinks
- String encodeRedirectURL(String url)
 Use for HTTP redirections
 These methods contain the logic to determine whether
the session ID needs to be encoded in the URL
 For example, if the request has a cookie, then url is returned
unchanged
 Some servers implement the two methods identically
Example:
<html><head><link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"
href="cartstyle.css"></head><body>
Hello new visitor!<br><br>
Your Shopping Cart:<ol><i> </i></ol>
<form method="POST“ action=
"ShoppingCart;jsessionid=2409D7C062C6E32E2B4F28EAB1
36E7F8">
Add item:<input name="item" type="text">
<input type="submit" value="send"><br><br><input
type="submit" value="Empty Cart" name="clear"></form>
</body></html>
Reference
 Representation and Management of Data on the Internet (67633),
Yehoshua Sagiv, The Hebrew University - Institute of Computer
Science.