I would like to eliminate the HttpSession completely - can I do this in web.xml? I'm sure there are container specific ways to do it (which is what crowds the search results when I do a Google search).
P.S. Is this a bad idea? I prefer to completely disable things until I actually need them.
I would like to eliminate the HttpSession completely
You can't entirely disable it. All you need to do is to just not to get a handle of it by either request.getSession()
or request.getSession(true)
anywhere in your webapplication's code and making sure that your JSPs don't implicitly do that by setting <%@page session="false"%>
.
If your main concern is actually disabling the cookie which is been used behind the scenes of HttpSession
, then you can in Java EE 5 / Servlet 2.5 only do so in the server-specific webapp configuration. In for example Tomcat you can set the cookies
attribute to false
in <Context>
element.
<Context cookies="false">
Also see this Tomcat specific documentation. This way the session won't be retained in the subsequent requests which aren't URL-rewritten --only whenever you grab it from the request for some reason. After all, if you don't need it, just don't grab it, then it won't be created/retained at all.
Or, if you're already on Java EE 6 / Servlet 3.0 or newer, and really want to do it via web.xml
, then you can use the new <cookie-config>
element in web.xml
as follows to zero-out the max age:
<session-config>
<session-timeout>1</session-timeout>
<cookie-config>
<max-age>0</max-age>
</cookie-config>
</session-config>
If you want to hardcode in your webapplication so that getSession()
never returns a HttpSession
(or an "empty" HttpSession
), then you'll need to create a filter listening on an url-pattern
of /*
which replaces the HttpServletRequest
with a HttpServletRequestWrapper
implementation which returns on all getSession()
methods null
, or a dummy custom HttpSession
implementation which does nothing, or even throws UnsupportedOperationException
.
@Override
public void doFilter(ServletRequest request, ServletResponse response, FilterChain chain) throws IOException, ServletException {
chain.doFilter(new HttpServletRequestWrapper((HttpServletRequest) request) {
@Override
public HttpSession getSession() {
return null;
}
@Override
public HttpSession getSession(boolean create) {
return null;
}
}, response);
}
P.S. Is this a bad idea? I prefer to completely disable things until I actually need them.
If you don't need them, just don't use them. That's all. Really :)