I completely agree that it must be a common problem and I have myself
spent some time considering how to solve this problem.
However, I really don't think that there is any "easy" solution since
browser-servlet applications are inheritly stateless. We only have the
cookie for maintaining state and the cookie is only browser specific and
not window specific. I have never done any GUI programming but I would
guess that such a problem is solved in GUI programming by using a unique
window id for each window.
You can divide the problem into two categories:
1) A users opens a new window because it was part of the application
(i.e. the link he following used javascript to open a URL in a new
window.
2) A users chooses himself to open a URL in a new window or he goes
directly to the URL by typing it in manually or using bookmarks.
In the first case, one could use a URL rewriting-like technique to
attach a "window id" to the new window and in that way identify it.
Generally this case should be easy to work around since the app designer
is in full control.
In the second case, the app designer have no control on when a URL is
opened in a new window, so there is really not much to do here. However,
I have noticed that in this case the browser will not send a "refererer"
request header so it is actually possible to detect this special case.
To really get something good to work it would be necessary to design a
good framework for working with these special techniques so that they
are hidden from the app designer most of the time. Several "hard"
decisisions would also have to be made along the way. For example, what
should happen to a user that "walks directly into an application" using
a direct URL ? Finally it would be necessary to check different browsers
behavior.
Sincerely,
Jesper Jorgensen
http://www.caput.com
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