Configuring Elvis 5 session timeouts

When a user logs in by using a Web browser, the Desktop client or the InDesign client, a new HTTP 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.

Desktop Client

A special case is the Desktop client: when it is logged in, a special request to the Server is made every 5 minutes. This prevents the session from expiring while the Desktop client is open and a user is logged in.

When the Desktop client is closed or when the user switches (through System > Switch User), the session automatically expires.

Note: The only case where a session can be left open is when the Desktop client is opened but the user is not working with it.

Forcing users out of a session

If needed, a system administrator can forcefully expire a user from a session through the Manage Sessions tab in the Desktop client.

For more information, see Forcing users out of their session in Elvis 5.

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 timeouts

This feature requires Elvis 5.0.61 or higher.

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

Note: For information about how to edit this file, see Changing the Elvis 5 Server configuration for a running cluster.

For Web clients

The Web session configuration affects all Web sessions including api-calls, plug-ins and Web clients. It is advised not to use time-outs shorter than 10 minutes so that the clients have sufficient time to notify the Server that they are active.

# Timeout in minutes used by server to remove inactive web client session.
# Negative or zero values will be changed to the default 30 minutes
#
session.timeout.web=30

For the Desktop clients

By default the session for the Desktop client never expires until the user logs out. Use the following setting if you do want to restrict the session time.

To change this behavior the time-out of both clients can be set individually with the following two properties:

# Timeout in minutes used by server to remove inactive desktop client session.
# Set to -1 to indicate no timeout while the client has an open connection.
#
session.timeout.air=-1

For the InDesign client

By default the session for the InDesign client never expires until the user logs out. Use the following setting if you do want to restrict the session time.

# Timeout in minutes used by server to remove inactive InDesign client session.
# Set to -1 to indicate no timeout while the client has an open connection.
#
session.timeout.indesign=-1