Hi.
I've got a bit of problem here with JSF. Somehow, i get my backing bean linked to the session, while they should be request time only.Here is my situation engineBean (request scope) is created by JSF (coming from a <bean> section in config) it returns an array of AssignmentBean, using various information from current user's account. Those bean are wrappers around a proprietary object then a jsp page has a datatable showing those AssignmentBean (using a value binding in form #{engineBean.assignments}) using HtmlOutput tags Questions: 1) How comes those beans, which are supposed to have a request scope only, end up stored in the session scope object "org.apache.myfaces.custom.redirectTracker.RedirectTrackerManager" 2) How to prevent this, considering those AssignmentBean are not serializable and will never be, and a such should never reach the session level. Thanks for information, currently this lead to bunch of exception when stopping tomcat because user sessions can not be serialized anymore!
The probem with request scope beans is that they get lost during the redirect. If you have a request scoped bean and get redirected (for instance if you invoke an action that navigates you to another page and it's redirect in navigation), you will actually get two requests. Consequently all the request beans instantiated on the first request will not appear in the second request. This may be a problem for many applications.
The solution is to track down redirects. Every time a redirect is executed, a special token is appended to the target URL. Then, upon receiving the second request, this token may be used to identify the redirect transition. This allows saving request beans in the session using the token before redirect and restore them for the request scope right after the redirect.
This allows request scope beans survive the redirect (and answers your first question).
As for the second question. In order to avoid serialization problems you session-based storage of request beans should be transient. If it's not the case in MyFaces, then it's a bug. File it or try to correct it yourself.
Bye. /lexi
