White-listing what?
In my recent post discussing the merits of Innovation Pack 15.2 / 14.8 I pointed out the new feature which would allow sessions to time-out regardless whether the message bar functionality is enabled or not. Traditionally when enabling the message bar in Siebel, a Siebel session would hardly time-out (depending whether the SessionTimeout value in the eapps.cfg would exceed the value of the object manager’s MessageBarUpdateInterval parameter. This latter scenario is typically the case.
Further, the High Interactivity client would gracefully close a Siebel session either if the user would explicitly log-out or use the infamous browser’s ‘X’ button. Important, because otherwise the message bar polling would keep the session alive.
However… with Open UI we have absolutely no means to capture the ‘X’ event. Period. That means, if you’d enable the message bar functionality (or rather “Notifications” as we call them in Open UI, because the message bar as such has gone) and a user would hit ‘X’ the Siebel session would remain a living thing. Killing those orphaned sessions would be an administrator job. Ugly.
So with patch set IP15.2/14.8 an important feature got introduced:
Siebel Session Time-Out Application Method White-listing
A feature with a generic nature, configurable through the eapps.cfg. White-listing as such that certain configured application methods would not reset the time-out counter.
Just add this parameter to your eapps.cfg in the [defaults] section, or override if you like on a specific virtual directory instead:
SessionTimeoutWLMethod = UpdatePrefMsg
The value could be a comma-separated list, to allow other (future) methods as well to be white-listed. If you ask me, quite an important feature. Why? Because with the introduction of the appealing “Notifications” feature in Open UI, the inherent problem allows orphaned sessions on the Siebel Servers easily to start piling up ridiculously fast. Train the users to log-out? You can try. But when was the last time you logged-out of any web application…? User’s are simply not doing this, how hard you try to train & explain.
– Jeroen
PS: I’m on holidays starting today – so I will be offline :-)
