Configuring Elvis 6 session time-outs

When a user logs in by using a Web browser or the InDesign client, a new session is started.

Every subsequent request made to the server will use that same session. Sessions automatically expire when users have been inactive for 30 minutes. This prevents a session from staying open when a computer is set to sleep mode or when the software crashes.

Note: Time-outs for clients are checked on a regular interval of 5 minutes. This means that when the time-out of a session is set to 30 minutes, it will expire between 30 and 35 minutes since the last action.

HTTP / API Interfaces

Custom interfaces that use the Elvis API do not keep their session alive by default. If required, this is easy to do by making an AJAX request to a URL on the Server every 5 minutes. A special URL is available for this purpose:

http://<Elvis serverUrl>/alive.txt?uid=...

Note: Make sure to append a unique value to 'uid=' with each request to prevent it from being returned from the browser cache or a proxy cache.

Configuring session timeout

Configure the following settings in the cluster-config.properties.txt file.

Note: For information about how to edit this file, see Changing the Elvis 6 Server configuration for a running cluster.

The session configuration affects all sessions including API-calls, plug-ins, the InDesign client, and Web clients.

Time-outs should not be shorter than 10 minutes to give the clients sufficient time to notify the Server that they are active.

# The timeout in minutes after which inactive users have to login again.
# The timeout value must be greater than 10 minutes.
#
session.timeout=30