Dear all,
I would like to ask assistance at the design level of logout tracking. I
am aware of the stateless nature of HTTP, etc. but I am involved in a
project with partial control of the general design. I am sure it has
happened to the best of you, at least once.
The problem I need to solve:
A web based information system with registered users is to be monitored
for user-modelling purposes. The nature of the service (financial news)
allows for inactive browsing. The information complexity might require the
user to open a second instance of the browser. The user-modelling team is
NOT satisfied with session time-out solutions because the user might have
stranded 25 of the 30 mins time-out limit to other sites (they have to
live with the fact that he/she might be for coffee).
The aim is to signal back to the server if the poor user tries to escape.
A servlet's doPost() could tidy up things, and the user might be prompted
for certain actions if appropriate.
I guess it is not the first time this scenario is aired in the list, but I
have not been able to find a 'proper' solution in the archives.
I have been looking into JavaScript's onUnload() capability but cannot
figure out how to configure this with multiple instances of browsers when
the user decides to kill just one of them or type a URL in one of them.
There's an onBeforeUnload() available only to IE 5.0
I have also been looking into 'invisible' applets, to utilise their
destroy() method for talking back to the servlet and this seems quite more
reasonable, because an instance 'registry' can be kept at the server for
each user. If this drops to zero, the user is out. The question is, is
this reliable? Has anybody tried it in a real project? Are there any other
more robust, more elegant or more correct solutions that I am missing?
Thank you,
Kostas
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