We live in a nice time, when you can develop a Spring application using java based configuration. No redundant XML code any more, just pure java code. In this article I want to discuss a popular topic about session management in Spring applications. If to be more precise I’m going to talk about a session timeout in java configuration style.

So in one of my previous blog posts I’ve already said how to manage a lifetime of session. But that solution implies usage of web.xml file, which is not required for java based configs. Because its role plays a class which extendsAbstractAnnotationConfigDispatcherServletInitializer class. Frequently it looks something like this:

import javax.servlet.Filter;
import org.springframework.web.filter.HiddenHttpMethodFilter;
import org.springframework.web.servlet.support.AbstractAnnotationConfigDispatcherServletInitializer;
public class Initializer extends AbstractAnnotationConfigDispatcherServletInitializer {
@Override
protected Class<?>[] getRootConfigClasses() {
return null;
}
@Override
protected Class<?>[] getServletConfigClasses() {
return new Class<?>[] { WebAppConfig.class };
}
@Override
protected String[] getServletMappings() {
return new String[] { "/" };
}
@Override
protected Filter[] getServletFilters() {
return new Filter[] { new HiddenHttpMethodFilter() };
}
}

I’ve written a lot about usage of such configurations, but here we should pay extra attention to classes which AbstractAnnotationConfigDispatcherServletInitializerextends. I talk about the AbstractDispatcherServletInitializer class. In its turn it hasonStartup(ServletContext servletContext) method. Its purpose is to configure aServletContext with any servlets, filters, listeners context-params and attributes necessary for initializing this web application.

Directly in this place it’s a good time to recall about the HttpSessionListenerinterface. As you have already guessed in an implementation of this interface we are able to manage each just created session a an application. For example we can set a maximum inactive interval equal to 5 minutes:

import javax.servlet.http.HttpSessionEvent;
import javax.servlet.http.HttpSessionListener;
public class SessionListener implements HttpSessionListener {
@Override
public void sessionCreated(HttpSessionEvent event) {
System.out.println("==== Session is created ====");
event.getSession().setMaxInactiveInterval(5*60);
}
@Override
public void sessionDestroyed(HttpSessionEvent event) {
System.out.println("==== Session is destroyed ====");
}
}

In order to apply this session management changes into our java based configurations, we have to add a following code snippet to Initializer class:

...
@Override
public void onStartup(ServletContext servletContext) throws ServletException {
super.onStartup(servletContext);
servletContext.addListener(new SessionListener());
}
...

That’s all java geeks, enjoy coding.