Session timeout? (SimpleSessionHandler)

[G�nter Ladwig]

Hi,
I'm having some problems with SOAP sessions (SimpleSessionHandler). The 
web service I'm trying to develop has an initialize() method which needs 
to be called once before subsequent calls to learnFromURL(). Because of 
this the object needs to be persistent, which is why I decided to use 
sessions. As the client is an Axis client I used SimpleSessionHandler. 
My server-config.wsdd contains this:

 <handler name="session" 
type="java:org.apache.axis.handlers.SimpleSessionHandler" />
 <service name="TextToOntoServer" provider="java:RPC">
  <requestFlow>
   <handler type="session" />
  </requestFlow>
  <responseFlow>
   <handler type="session"/>
  </responseFlow>
  <parameter name="allowedMethods" value="learn,learnFromURL,initialize"/>
  <parameter name="scope" value="session" />
  <parameter name="className" 
value="edu.unika.aifb.ttoServer.TextToOntoServer"/>
 </service>

The client-config.wsdd contains basically the same and in principal the 
session work, but I think the timeout is too short. The first call to 
initialize() takes up to 20 seconds to complete, which doesn't seem to 
be a problem. But learnFromURL() may take up to two minutes or more to 
complete. Here are excerpts from the client-server conversation:

Client calls initialize():
<soapenv:Envelope 
xmlns:soapenv="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/"; 
xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"; 
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance";>
 <soapenv:Body>
  <initialize 
soapenv:encodingStyle="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/encoding/"/>
 </soapenv:Body>

Server response (Session ID included):
[...]
 <soapenv:Header>
  <ns1:sessionID soapenv:mustUnderstand="0" xsi:type="xsd:long" 
xmlns:ns1="http://xml.apache.org/axis/session";>5539813838419223788</ns1:sessionID>
 </soapenv:Header>
[...]

Now the client calls learnFromURL() and passes the correct Session ID 
and the server response (about 2 minutes later) still contains the 
correct session ID. But the response to the next call contains a 
different session ID (the client still passed the correct session ID to 
the server):

[...]
 <soapenv:Header>
  <ns1:sessionID soapenv:mustUnderstand="0" xsi:type="xsd:long" 
xmlns:ns1="http://xml.apache.org/axis/session";>-7502308238410131107</ns1:sessionID>
 </soapenv:Header>
[...]

It seems to be that during the first call to learnFromURL() Axis loses 
the session, perhaps thinking it is inactive as there has been no 
activity for some time. Therefore it replys with another session ID to 
the second call to learnFromURL().

So, is there a way to avoid this? There are two methods in 
SimpleSessionHandler, which may be useful here: setReapPeriodicity and 
setDefaultSessionTimeout. But how and where do I call these methods? 
Neither the web service nor my client have any session code, I only made 
changes to server-config.wsdd and added a client-config.wsdd.

Thanks in advance.
G�nter